IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Administrator's Guide > Agent Management Services
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
Features of the Tivoli Agent Management Services
The Agent Management Services relies only on attributes that are common to all agents (such as file system installation location, file system log file location, and executable name), and APIs that are common to operating systems (such as enumerating the list of running processes). Using this information, the Agent Management Services improves agent availability and provides a simple, unified interface for the view and control of the agents' availability.
You can bring an agent under Agent Management Services management without making any changes to the agent. As additional agents are added to a system, they can be brought under Agent Management Services management.
Agent Management Services is a strategic approach to Tivoli Monitoring agent management that provides these features:
- Ability to monitor the availability of other agents and respond automatically to abnormalities according to user policy.
- An automated method through policy settings and a manual method through Tivoli Enterprise Portal take action commands to start, stop, manage, and unmanage an agent manually.
- Agent management workspaces with views of the information being collected by the Agent Management Services. The agent management workspaces are provided for the base and most distributed Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Agents.
Component relationships
The Agent Management Services uses three interfaces to communicate with other components in the OS agent process.Figure 1. Interactions of Agent Management Services components with IBM Tivoli Monitoring components
Component descriptions
Agent Management Services includes two components: Agent watchdog and Agent Management Services watchdog:
- Agent watchdog
- The agent watchdog performs specific availability monitoring actions against an agent based on the policy in the agent's common agent package (CAP) file. This component runs inside the OS agent process as a logical component. Other than the OS agent itself, the agent watchdog watches any monitoring agent that has an XML file in the CAP directory of the OS agent installation.
- Agent Management Services watchdog
- Who watches the watchdog? That is the job of the Agent Management Services watchdog, also known as the Proxy Agent Services Watchdog. You can check the status of this watchdog in the Agents’ Runtime Status view in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. It provides similar monitoring as the agent watchdog within the OS agent, but it is used only to watch the OS agent. The agent watchdog within the OS agent provides additional capability including the monitoring of other agents, responding to Tivoli Enterprise Portal Desktop queries and handling the Take Actions using the communication facility of the OS Agent. The Agent Management Services watchdog is included as a stand-alone executable file with the OS agents and runs as process kcawd on Linux and operating systems such as UNIX, and as process kcawd.exe on Windows.
Tivoli Enterprise Portal user interface
The Tivoli Enterprise Portal is the user interface for the Agent Management Services services, with predefined take action commands for manually starting or stopping management of an agent by the Agent Management Services, and for starting or stopping an agent when it is being managed by the Agent Management Services. These take action commands are available from the Agent Management Services workspace pop-up menus and can be referenced in situations for reflex automation.You can also continue use the familiar methods for starting and stopping an agent, such as through Manage Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Services and through the Tivoli Enterprise Portal navigator pop-up menu.
Parent topic:
Agent Management Services