IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Administrator's Guide > Introduction > New in this release
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
New in Version 6.3
The following enhancements to the Tivoli Management Services components affect the system administrator for Version 6.3.
- Jazz for Service Management
- Jazz for Service Management brings together the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) community's open specifications for linking data, shared administrative services, dashboard and reporting services. Through these facets, Jazz for Service Management accelerates deployment, integration, and workflow automation across IBM, partner, and third party tools. Jazz for Service Management is included with IBM Tivoli Monitoring.
- Jazz for Service Management has a number of integration services: Administration, Registry, IBM Tivoli Common Reporting, Security, and IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub. These integration services provide key features including:
- Shared data repository for products integrating through Jazz for Service Management.
- Consistent UI experience through Dashboard Application Services Hub in Jazz for Service Management.
- Simplified administration of products and solutions integrating through Jazz for Service Management.
- Ad hoc, self-service reporting through Tivoli Common Reporting in Jazz for Service Management.
For more information about Jazz for Service Management, go to the Jazz for Service Management Information Center.
- IBM Tivoli Monitoring dashboard data provider for retrieving monitoring data for display in IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub dashboards
- The IBM Tivoli Monitoring dashboard data provider retrieves monitoring agent data for display in the IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub component of Jazz for Service Management. The dashboard data provider is optionally installed during the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server configuration. With the dashboard data provider enabled, Dashboard Application Services Hub users can retrieve read-only data from the hub monitoring server and monitoring agent for display in dashboards provided by the agents or in custom dashboards. IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.3 includes the Infrastructure Management Dashboards for Servers that displays data for the OS agents. These server dashboards use the dashboard data provider to retrieve data. A connection to the dashboard data provider must be configured in Dashboard Application Services Hub. See Prepare your dashboard environment and Create a connection to the IBM Tivoli Monitoring dashboard data provider.
- IBM Infrastructure Management Dashboards for Servers running on the Dashboard Application Services Hub V3.1 or later
- With the IBM Tivoli Monitoring dashboard data provider enabled, Dashboard Application Services Hub users can retrieve managed system groups and events for all monitoring agents and Linux OS agent, UNIX OS agent, and Windows OS agent health metrics using the Infrastructure Management Dashboards for Servers application. This application is installed and configured into Dashboard Application Services Hub V3.1 or later using IBM Installation Manager. See "Installing and configuring the IBM Infrastructure Management Dashboards for Servers" in the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Installation and Setup Guide.
- Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration Performance Monitoring service provider
- The Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Automation Server component contains the Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration Performance Monitoring (OSLC-PM) service provider, and is installed on the same systems as your hub Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server. The service provider registers monitoring resources with the Jazz for Service Management Registry Services component and supports integration with other products using OSLC linked data interfaces. See Performance Monitoring service provider.
- Role-based authorization policies
- The Tivoli Authorization Policy Server feature provides you with greater access control capabilities than possible with the existing Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server authorization model. You can protect your resources from unauthorized access by users of monitoring dashboards in the IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub. IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.3 with the Authorization Policy Server feature enabled provides the following capabilities:
- The ability to restrict access for dashboard users to specific managed system groups and to individual managed systems.
- The ability to assign role-based policies to users and user groups in a federated LDAP user registry to simplify policy management.
- A new command-line interface that is highly automatable.
- Central management of authorization policies for multiple IBM Tivoli Monitoring environments, also called domains.
- To implement the feature install IBM Installation Manager packages for the Tivoli Authorization Policy Server and the tivcmd CLI> Command-Line Interface for Authorization Policy. The Authorization Policy Server is installed with your Dashboard Application Services Hub and the tivcmd CLI is installed on the computers used by the administrators who will be creating authorization policies. After successful installation of these two packages, you can execute various CLI commands as required to create roles, grant permissions, exclude permissions, and so on. For information on working with policies, see Use role-based authorization policies.
- OS Agents Report Prerequisites Scanner report
- The OS Agents Report Prerequisites Scanner report delivered and installed through the OS agent report package, can be leveraged to check that your system’s IBM Tivoli Monitoring prerequisites are configured correctly to use Tivoli Common Reporting without errors. See Run a prerequisites scan.
- Create and maintain the dimension tables required for Tivoli Common Reporting using the Summarization and Pruning agent
- You no longer have to periodically run the Tivoli Common Reporting and OS agent scripts to maintain the IBM_TRAM schema and populate the MANAGEDSYSTEM table. You can configure the Summarization and Pruning agent to create, populate, and maintain the dimension tables. See Create and maintain the dimension tables.
- Tivoli Data Warehouse range partitioning
- Range partitioning is a database data organization feature that can significantly improve pruning and query performance in large Tivoli Data Warehouse databases. You can migrate your existing tables to a partitioned table to take advantage of the performance improvements provided with partitioned tables. Range partitioning allows the database to limit the scope of queries when the column that is part of the partitioning key is used in the WHERE clause. See Tivoli Data Warehouse range partition migrations.
- Take Action identity auditing
- You can now audit any commands that are executed on a system at the agent level. The originator's user ID and network information are securely transferred to the agent and then recorded in the agent's audit log. The audit log can be historically collected. You can create situations and monitor centrally from the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. See Take Action and command execution audit logging.
- AAGP authorization controls
- The Access Authorization Group Profile (AAGP) authorization framework is now integrated with the Take Action identity auditing. The AAGP policies now selectively allow specific users to execute take actions from Tivoli Enterprise Portal or using tacmd executeaction, to execute commands using tacmd executecommand, or to create and modify situations and workflow policies that specify a take action command. The AAGP policy no longer requires the Central Configuration server to deliver the AAGP policy. The policy can be configured from the Agent Service Interface and stored locally on the agent itself. See Access Authorization Group Profile and Centralized Configuration.
- SOAP security enhancements
- You can now enable security for CT_EMail and CT_Export requests using the SOAP_IS_SECURE environment variable on the monitoring server. See Enable SOAP security.
- Duper process optimization
- The duper process now supports situations that contain reflex actions or display items. See Duper process for optimizing situations.
- Changes to default self-describing agent behavior and new tacmd commands
- You can now specify what products and versions are installed on your monitoring server and portal server by the automatic self-describing agent process. See Self-describing monitoring agents and Dynamically updating the self-describing installation options.
- Updates for private situations
- *REGEX predicate function
IBM Tivoli Monitoring frequently requires text scan and pattern matching upon event and sample data, such as name, address, message, and log record. You can add the Regular Expression predicate filter to private situations to enhance agent monitoring event detection.
- Dynamically delete a private situation
You can now use the DELETE= attribute in a private situation to dynamically remove a private situation without recycling the agent or deleting the local private situation XML file.
- See Private situation XML specification.
- Ability to clear the Deployment Status table transactions
- Each time you issue an tacmd command or use the Tivoli Enterprise Portal navigator to remotely manage a Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Agent, information about the transaction is preserved in the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server Deployment Status table. To make it easier to manage the contents of this table, especially in large environments, you can schedule the periodic removal of completed transactions from the table. See Clear the Deployment Status table.
- Use of login daemon scripts available on IBM Service Management Connect
- In IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.3 or later, monitoring servers can now use the IBM Tivoli Monitoring login daemon solution that is available on IBM Service Management Connect to change the monitoring server an agent connects to. See Change the monitoring server an agent connects to.
- Set the locale for the browser client
- Administrators can no longer set the locale for the Tivoli Enterprise Portal browser client Enterprise-wide. The language can be changed through the Java control panel at the client computer if the underlying OS platform has been installed using a different locale than the one you want to use with the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. See the user.language and user.region parameters in Portal client parameter list.
- Tivoli Integrated Portal name change
- The V3.1 release of Tivoli Integrated Portal is now referred to as the Dashboard Application Services Hub.
- i5/OS™ agent name change
- The i5/OS monitoring agent is now referred to as the IBM i monitoring agent.
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New in this release