IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Installation Guides > High Availability Guide for Distributed Systems > Monitor functions and architecture > Monitor functions
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
Situations, events, and alerts
Use the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, users can create monitoring specifications called situations to detect when specific conditions or events in their environment occur, thus raising an alert. Each situation is assigned (or distributed) to one or more managed systems that is to be monitored for a specific condition of a set of conditions.
There are two types of events that might be triggered by a situation: pure or sampled. When the determination of the event must be made based on observations made at specific intervals, the event is known as a sampled event. When the event is based on a spontaneous occurrence, the event is known as a pure event. Therefore, situations for sampled events have an interval associated with them, while those for pure events do not. Another characteristic of sampled events is that the condition that caused the event can change, thus causing it to be no longer true. Pure events cannot change. Therefore, alerts raised for sampled events can transition from true to not true, while a pure event stays true when it occurs.
An example of a sampled event is number of processes > 100. An event becomes true when the number of processes exceeds 100 and later becomes false again when this count drops to 100 or lower. A situation that monitors for an invalid logon attempt by user is a pure event: the event occurs when an invalid logon attempt is detected, and does not become a False event.
System managers can also specify actions that must be taken when an event occurs. For example, when a disk becomes full, a command can automatically be run to delete temporary files, thereby reclaiming additional storage.
Parent topic:
Monitor functions