IBM Enterprise Console manual Understanding Adapters, Adapter Overview

Chapter 1. Understanding Adapters

Event adapters are software programs that collect information, perform local filtering, and convert relevant events into a format that can be used by the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console product. Because adapters are located on or near their event sources and can perform local filtering of events, the adapters create a minimal amount of additional network traffic. Adapters use a minimal amount of system resources to perform their functions.

Network management applications have become an important part of monitoring the availability of resources in the enterprise. The IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console product can seamlessly integrate alarms and events from all the major network management platforms and can correlate them with other system, database, and application events.

Adapters are passive collectors of all types of events from systems and applications, including the network management applications. All of your existing network management configuration and monitoring of events can be preserved; these events can simply be forwarded to the event server for correlation with other events, where automated responses can be triggered or Information Technology (IT) staff can be notified.

Adapter Overview

An adapter is a process that monitors resources so that they can be managed. These monitored resources are called sources. A source is an application (for example, a database) or system resource (for example, an NFS server). When an adapter detects an event generated from a source (generally called a raw event), it formats the event and sends it to the event server. The event server then further processes the event.

Adapters can monitor sources in the following ways:

vAn adapter can receive events from any source that actively produces them. For example, SNMP adapters can receive traps sent by the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

vAn adapter can check an ASCII log file for raw events at configurable intervals if the source updates a log file with messages.

How Events Get Sent to the Event Server

Adapters can send events to the event server using a TME® interface or a non-TME interface. Both types of interfaces send events using an ordinary TCP/IP channel. The difference between the two interfaces is the method used to establish the connection. A TME interface establishes a connection using the oserv services provided by Tivoli Management Framework; therefore, adapters that use this interface are referred to as TME adapters. A non-TME interface establishes connections using standard interprocess communication mechanisms (for example, opening an IP socket); therefore, adapters that use this interface are called non-TME adapters.

How Events Get to the Event Server From an Endpoint

TME adapters installed on endpoints send their events to the lcfd process, which then sends the events to an IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console gateway, which in turn

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