Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1 Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux,Windows

Working with application policies

Use Resource Policies to create and manage policies for composite applications. Policies provide an efficient way for administrators and application managers to monitor and manage application lifecycle.

From the main menu, click Administration > Access > Resource Policies to create and manage policies for composite applications. Starting with the main policy for composite applications, you can create child policies for subsets of applications. When assigned to particular applications, these specialized policies monitor application size and activity according to the policy settings that you specify. Policies are assigned to applications by the value of the Policy Selection Attribute. The value of the Policy Selection Attribute is the name of the condition evaluated and applied by the policy rule for the application. The Policy Selection Attribute is an application parameter. Therefore, its value is set and stored in the application template and is available for editing as an application component in particular applications. You receive notification when conditions in applications reach warning or violation status. From the applications catalog, you can view general or detailed status for each application. Depending on current conditions of an application, you can decide to assign a different policy, edit the policy settings, or perform a maintenance action on the application: backup, archive, restore, or delete.

The following sections provide task previews and an example for creating policies for composite applications and managing application status. When you perform these tasks using the portlets for Resource Policies, Personalization, and Applications, remember to refer to the Help topics and complementary sections of this information center.

Prerequisites

Creating application policies

Managing application status with policies

Example

Prerequisites

• Understand the general concepts for managing portal resources with policies. Remember that when you work with policies you use the Personalization Editor to create, select, and edit business rules; and you use Resource Permissions to assign access to users of policies and business rules.
• Review the policy settings for composite applications to understand the application conditions that policies will monitor.
• Consider the types of applications that are deployed in your enterprise and the users who work with them.

  Preliminary analysis will help you identify the application templates for various application categories that you will need to create. It will also help you identify the attribute values that you will need for conditional expressions in the business rules that you create for application policies.

• Refer to the simple example at the end of this topic to see how a policy rule expresses conditions using the Policy Selection Attribute and how the Policy Selection Attribute is specified as an application parameter in application templates.

Creating application policies

In the Resource Policies portlet, the main Composite Application policy defines the limits for application size, frequency of use, and periods of no modification. You can keep the default policy settings for the main Composite Application policy or modify them. Then you can refine the main policy by creating child policies to assign to the different classes of applications that you need to monitor. When you create child policies for composite applications, you create policy rules and conditions or reuse existing rules and conditions that are available in the Personalization Navigator and Personalization Editor. For detailed information about working with policies, see the Help topics that are available from the Resource Policies portlet.

To work with the Composite Application policy, from the main menu, click Administration > Access > Resource Policies.

Here is a preview of viewing and refining the Composite Application policy:

1. To view and edit the main policy settings for composite applications, display the policy menu of the portal resource Composite Application and click Edit Policy.

   The policy specifies and monitors the limits for application size, frequency of use, and periods of no modification. The policy also sets the warning thresholds for application size, inactivity, and staleness and who should receive e-mail notices of application status. Notices include warnings for applications with conditions approaching policy limits and messages citing violations of applications that have exceeded the limits set by the policy.

   Attention: You can select one or both of the following notification options when you edit application policies:

   • Send e-mail to administrators.
   • Send e-mail to application owner.
   Be aware that application users who are not portal administrators might receive application status notices that refer to them as administrators. This situation can arise if you create a new application role that is based on the default Users role and then specify the additional permissions defined for the default Administrators role: edit the application and control membership. If you do this, you have, in effect, created another administrator role for members of the application. Remember to type a description that indicates that the new role has the additional permissions provided by the default Administrator role: For example, consider reusing the default description, Can edit the application and control membership.

   The policy also specifies the settings that can be modified in child policies created from this main policy. Policy settings that you can modify in child policies will allow for greater refinement when you specialize the policy for particular subsets of applications, as shown in the example.

2. To perform other actions on the main policy for composite applications, display the policy menu of the portal resource Composite Application and click one of the following actions:

   • Import Policy Definition
   • Export Policy Definition
   • Assign User Access to Policy
3. To specialize the main policy for composite applications, you create child policies. Child policies help you manage subsets of applications. Click the Composite Application policy link to display the portlet view where you can create a new policy based on an existing policy rule or a new rule that you create. The new policy will be a child policy of the main Composite Application policy.
4. Before you can create a child policy, create or select a policy rule that expresses the conditions that you need for the new policy. From the policy rule drop-down menu, click Create New Rule or Select Rule to display the Personalization Editor. Each rule contains one or more conditions.Attributes for expressing conditions in policy rules for Composite Applications are the following:

   • Category
   • Policy Selection Attribute
   • Template

   You can see how the Template and Category attributes might be used in a rule that expresses the default conditions for composite applications:

   Default Application is
   Composite Application when
   current CompositeApplication.Template is Portal Blank Template and
   current CompositeApplication.Category is Composite Applications

   As shown in the example, the rule for creating child policies used to manage personal, departmental, and division applications might have one or more conditional expressions, each of which is evaluated using the value of the Policy Selection Attribute that you specify as an application parameter in the application template. Refer to the example to see how the Organizational Level rule would appear in the Personalization Editor.

5. After you create application templates, you specify the value of the Policy Selection Attribute by editing the value of this application parameter.

   If your new application templates are based on Portal Blank Template, the default value of the Policy Selection Attribute is CompositeApp. This value assigns the main Composite Application policy to any applications that are created from Portal Blank Template.

   1. Consider creating application templates for each subset of applications that you want to manage with child policies. For example, you might create three templates: Personal Application, Department Application, and Division Application.
   2. In the Application Template Library, select a template and click Edit Template Parameters.
   3. Edit the Policy Selection Attribute parameter to add the value that you need for the selected template. Using the example, type one of the following values:

      • Personal
      • Department
      • Division
   4. Edit the parameters of the other two templates, specifying the appropriate value for the Policy Selection Attribute of the selected template.
6. In the applications catalog, when users create new applications, Set Component Properties displays the value of the Policy Selection Attribute as an application parameter. Users can type another value for the Policy Selection Attribute if they wish and thereby change the policy assigned to the application.
7. The child policies are displayed in the Resource Policies portlet under the parent policy. Edit the settings of each child policies: From the policy menu of a child policy, click Edit Policy and specify the values you want for each setting. Refer to the example to see how application size limits and warning thresholds might be set in the three hypothetical child policies.
8. After you create child policies and edit their settings, the policies are applied to the appropriate applications by virtue of the Policy Selection Attribute that is defined in the application template. The policy assigned to each application monitors the conditions specified in the policy settings and detects application status, as described in the next section.

Managing application status with policies

• When conditions in applications are approaching the limits set by the policy
• When conditions in applications have reached or exceeded the limits set by the policy.

For detailed information about working with application templates and composite applications, see the Help topics that are available from the Template Library, the Application Library, and the applications catalog.

To see the status of applications as detected by the policies assigned to them, view the applications catalog: From the main menu, click Templates > Application Library.

Here is a preview of viewing application status, changing the assigned policy, and performing application maintenance tasks:

1. Filter the applications catalog to display the applications that have reached warning conditions: Click Show > Applications with Policy Alerts.
2. Filter the applications catalog to display the applications that have violated the limits on size, inactivity, and staleness: Show > Applications with Policy Violations.
3. Specify the level of status information that you want to see in the Status column of the applications catalog: From the catalog portlet menu, click Edit Shared Settings and choose to display a simple summary or detailed information.Choosing detailed information changes the single Status column to three columns:

   • Size Status
   • Inactivity Status
   • No Modification Status
4. Click the Status link for a particular application, to display the Policy Status portlet and review the following information:

   • Application properties: name, general status, category and template
   • Currently assigned policy, qualified by its place in the policy hierarchy
   • The value of the Policy Selection Attribute currently used as the condition in the policy rule that determines which policy is assigned to the application.
   • The table of Policy Settings, Policy Allowance, Application Current Value, and Application Status for the currently assigned policy.
5. To change the assigned policy, edit the value of the Policy Selection Attribute. You must type a value that has been specified as a condition in policy rules using CompositeApplication.PolicySelectionAttribute or in application templates using the parameter Policy Selection Attribute. Tip: If you cannot remember the values of the Policy Selection Attribute that you specified in policy rules or as application parameters in application templates, you can look up attribute values in the Personalization Navigator for Business Rules or in the application templates listed in the Template Library.
6. After you change the assigned policy, click Update Status to refresh the information detected by the newly assigned policy for the application.Note: Updating status refreshes the application and policy information, but it does not trigger policy manager actions such as locking the application or sending e-mail notifications. For example, if the application exceeds the limits set by the newly assigned policy, the status information will reflect this; however, the application will not be locked and notifications will not be sent until the policy manager daemon runs again.
7. The status of an application as detected by its policy will help you determine which maintenance action you might need to perform: Back up, Archive, Restore, or Delete. Alternatively, you may want to change the assigned policy or edit the policy settings to adjust the application conditions that you want to monitor.

   If an application has exceeded the limits set by its policy for size, inactivity, and staleness, the application is locked. The padlock icon is displayed in front of the application name in the catalog. If you are an administrator or an application manager, you can click the padlock icon to unlock the application. Then open the application to refine the elements that require attention. Consider updating the policy settings or assigning a different policy to the application.

8. You must enable the application property Application Backup for Archiving and Restore: From the page menu of the application, click Edit Application Properties.

   For each application that is enabled for back up, the catalog displays the Backup and Archive icons. If you have backed up or archived an application, the Restore icon is also displayed.

9. You must also configure the Mail Service for mail applications to send notifications when applications approach, reach, or exceed the limits set by their policies: Note: Perform this procedure from the IBM^® WebSphere^® Application Server Administrative Console, where you manage the Mail Service.

   1. Enable the Mail Service for mail applications and verify that it works.
   2. From the navigation tree of the Administrative Console, click Resources > Mail Providers.
   3. Click Built-in Mail Provider.
   4. From the Additional Properties panel, click Mail Sessions.
   5. Note the JNDI Name of the mail session.
   6. Click the Mail Sessions link for the JNDI name of the mail service.
   7. Change the Mail Transport Host from the default setting to the name of your mail server.
   8. Make sure that the Transport Protocol is SMTP. Specify the host name of the SMTP server. Replace the default host name with the name of the SMTP server that routes mail for this network.Note: Do not change the other settings on this panel. Never change the value in the JNDI Name field.
   9. Click OK > Save > Save.
   10. From the navigation tree of the Administrative Console, click Resources > Resource Environment Providers.
   11. Create a new Provider named WP MailService. The mail service is listed with other available services.
   12. Select the service from the list to edit it.
   13. Click Custom Properties.
   14. Create two new custom properties with these names and values:

       • mail.from.fallback a valid e-mail address for your portal administrator .
       • mail.jndi.name the JNDI name of the mail service from the Mail Sessions link in Step f.
   15. Click OK > Save > Save.
   16. Reboot the portal server.

Example

Here is a simple example that illustrates how you might refine the main policy for composite applications with child policies. The example is partial; it does not refer to all of the policy settings for composite applications and it does not illustrate lower-level child policies. This refinement of the main policy is based on applications deployed at different organizational levels within your enterprise and focuses on application size.

A refinement of the Composite Application policy might include three child policies that apply particular conditions of the Organizational Level rule to monitor the size of applications for personal use, departmental use, and division use. The following table illustrates how the default values of the main Composite Application policy might be refined for organizational subsets of applications based on application size.

The three child policies are peers; they are on the same level of the policy hierarchy under the main policy. Therefore, the child policies will use the same policy rule, Organizational Level. Each child policy will apply the condition of the rule that is expressed by the value of the Policy Selection Attribute.

Here is how the rule named Organizational Level might use the Policy Selection Attribute to express the necessary conditions for each child policy – Personal Application, Department Application, and Division Application:

Organizational Level is
Personal Application when
current CompositeApplication.PolicySelectionAttribute is
Personal
Department Application when
current CompositeApplication.PolicySelectionAttribute is
Department
Division Application when
current CompositeApplication.PolicySelectionAttribute is
Division

• Composite Application policy definition
  The definition of the main policy for the portal resource Composite Application is specified in createCompositeAppRootNode.xml.