UNIX Fault Management: A Guide for System Administrators

Unicenter TNG

Computer Associates' Unicenter The Next Generation (TNG) is an enterprise management platform that provides graphical status monitoring. It provides system and network management for an enterprise of heterogeneous systems. Unicenter TNG provides monitoring and management for all the resources in your environment, including system resources, networks, databases, and applications.

Unicenter TNG provides a framework for an integrated management solution to manage all IT resources via a common infrastructure. The TNG framework itself includes the following components : auto discovery, object repository, Real World interface, event management, calendar management, reporting, virus detection, and desktop support. Together with vendor, third-party, and custom-built applications, Unicenter TNG provides increased management and maintenance capabilities for the enterprise.

A Common Object Repository stores the information used to create the Real World graphical views. You can browse the repository by using the Class Browser, Object Browser, or Topology Browser. Using the ObjectView, you can get details on the performance of devices, and even graph the data.

The Real World interface provides graphical views that can be organized based on business functions, geography, or any logical groupings. The views can show the topology of the enterprise in two or three dimensions. These views can be used to see the status of the systems and resources in your environment.

Unicenter TNG manages by using a distributed management approach. Distributed agents are responsible for monitoring and control. Centralized managers provide core management throughout the enterprise, including data correlation from one or more agents, workload management, and job management. The agents monitor and control based on policies provided by managers.

Monitored Components

Unicenter TNG has available agents to monitor CPU and memory, swap usage, and filesystem space. You can also monitor file sizes and modifications. Messages in log files can also be periodically checked.

The agents run on managed nodes and gather data, apply filters, and report when necessary. Some provide control or execution on behalf of the managers. The agents send notifications and can be polled. They can also collect performance data or be configured to send events and perform actions based on thresholds.

Monitoring Features

The core Unicenter TNG product contains modules for a variety of system management functions: network management, calendar management, software distribution, event management, user /security management, workload management, tape/file management, printer/spool management, and reporting. The most common management components used by Unicenter TNG customers are database, event, and performance management.

Agents are available that can do threshold monitoring and take automated or manual actions. Alarms can be sent based on metrics measured over a specified period of time. A distributed state machine for event correlation is also available.

CA Unicenter/DB Alert is a system monitor for databases and database applications. CA Unicenter/System Alert is a client/server application that provides some system and application-level monitoring. CA Unicenter/AP (Automation Point) and CA Unicenter/AHD (Advanced Help Desk) help with problem escalation, notification, and incident tracking.

Unicenter TNG is layered on top of the Unicenter suite of system management tools. It enables you to configure business views so that operators can monitor systems based on business processes, such as purchasing, inventory, or payroll, without displaying resources and systems that are not involved.

One unusual feature of Unicenter TNG is its Real World interface, a 3D view of the objects being monitored in the computing environment. Managed objects can also be shown in 2D, tree view, or text form.

Information about managed objects is stored in an object repository. Search and query tools are provided to allow management applications to extract information from the database.

Unicenter TNG's Workload Management function can be used to schedule and monitor jobs. Jobs that fail can be automatically restarted. Workload Management can also ensure that jobs do not run beyond their configured time limits.

Unicenter's Spool Management function can be used to monitor the status of the UNIX spooler daemon or a print device. It can start and stop the daemon or alter print jobs already queued to the printer.

Monitor Discovery and Configuration

Unicenter TNG provides automatic discovery of networked objects, including systems and other resources within the enterprise. Information is stored in the Common Object Repository and can be displayed topographically in the Real World interface. Discovery filters can also be used to limit discovery to a specific subnetwork or to specify which types of resources Unicenter TNG should discover. In addition to network discovery, more can be discovered if a Unicenter intelligent agent is installed on the system.

A centralized Event Console Log GUI is available in Unicenter TNG to receive events from throughout the enterprise, including any system or application message written to the system log. Users can configure additional messages from other log files to send to the Event Console. Events are shown with timestamps, the system that sent the message, the message text, and other information. Automated actions can be configured for each event. Actions can be based on pattern matching of the received messages. Messages can also be forwarded to other event managers.

For viewing agents and getting information about the agents, Unicenter TNG provides a MIB-II agent view to view MIB-II information, a node view, a Distributed State Machine (DSM) view, and an Event Browser. The DSM view tracks the status of objects across the network. It gathers information from the repository and agents, to maintain the state of objects based on configured policies. The node view displays detailed state information about the system objects that are watched by the DSM.

In conjunction with the calendar management function provided by Unicenter TNG, you can change or set event policies based on the time. For example, you may want to apply different policies during the weekend .

Computer Associates also repackages some of its monitoring and discovery features into its Unicenter TNG Framework, which it ships for free on some platforms, including HP-UX.

Monitor Developer's Kit

An Agent Factory is provided that enables software developers to integrate their own monitors with Unicenter TNG. This is similar to the EMS developer's kit, which is used to integrate new monitors into the EMS environment. A software developer's kit is also available to help other vendors integrate applications into Unicenter TNG.

Notification Methods

The management agents can detect event conditions and forward them to the management station. The events are sent as SNMP traps.

Diagnostic Capabilities

Unicenter TNG does not provide the sophisticated event correlation capabilities available from other products, such as IT/O. The Event Console can be integrated with other functions, such as problem management, which can be used to identify and escalate certain problems automatically. A trouble ticket can be generated automatically when an event arrives at the management station.

Managing events is one of the core capabilities provided by Unicenter TNG. The hub of event management is at the Unicenter TNG Event Console. Here you can configure policies to respond automatically to specific events, forward events, filter unimportant events, correlate events from several agents, and feed events into the DSM.

Unicenter TNG does not provide continuous collection of performance data, nor does it provide the sophisticated drill-down diagnostic capability found with the integration of IT/O, PerfView, and MeasureWare.

Additional Information

Additional information about Computer Associates can be found on their Web site at http://www.cai.com/unicenter/.