IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Administrator's Guide > Maintaining monitoring agents > Self-describing monitoring agents
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
Enable or disable the self-describing capability at the monitoring server
You can enable or disable the self-described agent capability for a specific monitoring server through an environment configuration variable at the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server. Disable the self-describing feature any time you do not want automatic update and propagation of self-described agent application metadata to occur for a specific monitoring server. Then, the application support for the agent must be manually installed and activated at each monitoring server and portal server. By default the self-describing capability for remote monitoring servers is turned on, and for hub monitoring servers it is turned off.
Best practice is to control the self-describing agent capability from the hub monitoring server, since enabling or disabling at the hub monitoring server affects all remote monitoring servers and agents that connect to it.Enable or disable the self-describing capability at a specific remote monitoring server affects all agents that connect to that server only.
Use the following steps to temporarily stop self-describing at a single monitoring server by editing the target monitoring server environment variable.
Procedure
- On the computer where the monitoring server is installed, in the Manage Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Services application, right-click Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server and select Advanced→ Edit ENV file.
- Edit the existing environment variable: KMS_SDA=Y | N
- On the computer where the monitoring server is installed, change to the <install_dir>/config/ directory.
- Open the <tems_hostname>_ms_<tems_name>.config file.
- Edit the existing environment variable: KMS_SDA=Y | N
- See KMS_SDA in the IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE and Tivoli Management Services on z/OS: Common Planning and Configuration Guide.
What to do next
Restart the monitoring server.You can then review the agent support versions in the following ways:
- Review the agent and monitoring server operations logs to determine if the agent is operating in the standard or the self-described agent mode. The Managed System Status workspace has a link to the operations log for each monitoring agent.
- The tacmd listappinstallrecs command returns the application support installation records and the tacmd listSdaStatus command displays the current self-describing agent operational status for all monitoring servers in the environment. Remember that these commands are not available when the monitoring server is not running. See Self-describing agent installation.
Parent topic:
Self-describing monitoring agentsRelated tasks:
Suspend the self-describing capability
Enable or disable the self-describing capability at the agent
Determine if agents are enabled for self-descriptionRelated reference:
Environment variables that control the self-describing capabilityRelated information:
Self-describing event flow at the monitoring server
Self-describing agent installation
Self-describing auto refresh and seeding