Production cells and test cells

A production cell is a cell that service operators and service managers use to monitor the events and services associated with your IT resources in real time.

A test cell provides senior service managers and service administrators with a test environment. For event management, a test cell provides KB developers with a test environment for defining event classes, event management rules, policies, actions, and collectors and testing their behavior with test event data.

Production and test cell naming and creation

The only way to distinguish a test cell from a production cell is by the cell name. Adopt a naming convention for test and production cells that clearly identifies its purpose.

You name a cell when it is created. The default production cell is created when you install the Infrastructure Management Server. An additional cell can be created when you install a local agent on a remote computer.

You use the mcrtcell command to create additional production or test cells on a local computer where the cell is being created. For more information about syntax and options available with mcrtcell, see mcrtcell.

Production and test cell configuration

In the administrator console, assign the production and test cells to a group. The default groups are MyTest and MyProduction.

Cells and aliases

A service model component can be assigned to only one cell at a time. If you want, for example, to assign a component to a production cell and, at the same time, use it in a test cell for impact experiments, a mechanism is needed to make this possible.

The parameters, HomeCell and CellAliases, and the attributes HomeCell and HomeCellAlias are used by Publishing Server to determine the cells to which a CI is sent, depending on which have values.

CellAliases and HomeCell are parameters of the publishing environment, whereas HomeCell and HomeCellAlias are attributes of the CI.

The environment’s parameter home cell defines the one cell to which all service model data and management data is sent.

The component’s attribute home cell alias defines another name for home cell looked up from a table so that the data with a specific home cell alias can be sent to different cells for different publishing environments.

Cell alias defines another name for a cell so that data can be sent to more than one cell. A cell can have multiple cell aliases. The mapping of cell name to cell alias is one to many per environment. In other words, for each environment and for each cell alias, there can be only one cell name, but many cell aliases can be mapped to the same cell name.

A cell name can only be used in one Atrium CMDB Publish environment; however, it can bere-usedin many Direct Publish environments, even if it is also used in Atrium CMDB environment.

Cell-alias to cell-name values must already be defined when publishing is initiated.

For information about building a service model, see Building a service model.

Viewing test cell data

 You view test data in administrator console.

• To view test event data, collectors, and actions, select a test cell in the Event Management Policies view. 
• To view and create test event management policies, select a test cell in the Event Management Policies view. 
• To view test service model components, use the Find tool in the Services tab and select a test cell.