5.1 Data Inventory

To determine what data you want to integrate, you need to identify the data you need, then consider how the systems from which data is collected are organized and should be integrated into Operations Center. You also need to make sure that you have information from the third-party management systems and other tools from which you are integrating data.

5.1.1 Identify Needed Data

To identify the data that you want to integrate into Operations Center, consider that Operations Center relates business services to IT resources. Data is used in Operations Center as elements that represent objects or processes within your business services.

Most business services rely on a standard set of IT resources, summarized in Table 5-1:

Table 5-1 Business Service Resource Components

Category	Monitored Objects	Explanation
Network	Routers, switches, Virtual Private Networks, ports, and so on	The paths that exist between the enterprise management platforms and the servers where the application components exist.
Users	Workstations, routers, switches, Virtual Private Networks, ports, and so on	The devices and paths that allow users to connect to an application front-end (such as, Web server).
Servers	CPU, memory, and file system space utilization, and so on	Includes the servers on which application processes run, as well as other servers upon which an application might be dependent.
Applications	Running processes, services, tasks, and so on	Processes and services that must run to drive an application.
Databases	Database tables, locks, database processes and services, and so on	Also monitors the processes, services, and servers that support the database itself.

After identifying the IT and enterprise resource components, perform a Business Process Analysis (BPA) to identify all the business management systems that provide information about them.

If you are missing any data, consider how to capture. A Operations Center tool used for integration, such as Business Data Integrator or Event Manager, might be able to capture the data you need. Or, you might need to consider implementing additional third-party management systems.

5.1.2 Organize Systems

To integrate data into Operations Center server, you should consider how your management systems are deployed.

You can have multiple installations of the same management system because the tool is monitoring specific areas, or because it is deployed using multiple instances of the management platform. In some cases, you can connect to a top-level system or replace the top-level system with Operations Center.

Figure 5-1 shows a sample Tivoli T/EC environment with multiple T/EC systems:

Figure 5-1 Tivoli T/EC Environment with Multiple T/EC Systems

In this example, T/EC Server 1 monitors a specific group of servers and T/EC Server 2 monitors other servers. A master T/EC Server rolls up the data from the two T/EC Servers.

One option for integrating the T/EC systems with Operations Center is to replace the T/EC Master Server with a Operations Center server as shown in Figure 5-2:

Figure 5-2 Replacing the T/EC Master Server with a Operations Center server

In this option, each server communicates directly with the Operations Center server. You should define two adapters in the Operations Center console to account for each of the T/EC Servers.

If additional rules processing or correlation takes place in the Master T/EC Server, do not replace it with the Operations Center server. Instead, exercise the second option for integrating these systems.

The second option is to have the Operations Center server communicate with the Master T/EC Server as shown in Figure 5-3:

Figure 5-3 Operations Center server Communicating with the Master T/EC Server

In the second option, Operations Center server communicates only with the Master T/EC Server, so you only need to define one adapter to it in the Operations Center console.

5.1.3 Note System Information

The process of connecting Operations Center to a management system relies on an understanding of the following elements of your environment:

Management system vendor and version
IP address, host machine name, network route of the system
Any network firewalls between management systems
Login user names, passwords, repository names, and so on

This information is required for defining adapters in the Operations Center console for integration. Details vary based on the type of management system.