BEM actor adapter

The actor adapter for BMC Event Manager (BEM) performs the following operations on BMC Service Impact Manager (BMC SIM) cells:

• Creates, updates, retrieves, and annotates events
• Enables and disables the maintenance mode
  The adapter operations target BMC Event Manager (BMC EM) cells.

Each request to the adapter starts a sequence of requests and responses between the adapter and BMC Event Manager. When an adapter receives a request, the following sequence occurs:

1. The adapter looks up the IP address of the host cell in the mcell.dir file local to the TrueSight Orchestration peer. For details about the mcell.dir file, see Communicating with a BEM cell.
2. The adapter opens a client connection to the cell specified in the request or the default cell specified in the adapter configuration.
3. The adapter registers itself with the server by issuing a register request.
4. The BMC Impact Administration Server acknowledges the registration request. The adapter receives the acknowledgment asynchronously when the underlying API invokes the processAnswer() callback method.
5. The adapter sends the actual query request to the server. The server returns the response to the query with the processAnswer() callback method.
6. The adapter sends additional requests and operations, if required, and the server returns the responses to these requests with the same processAnswer() callback method.
7. The adapter closes and unregisters requests. The BEM server acknowledges these requests.
8. The adapter closes the client connection.
9. The adapter collates all the responses from the server and returns the adapter response to the caller.
10. Adapter requests can target different BMC Event Manager cells. The adapter creates and closes a new connection for each request.

11. The adapter converts the requests into Basic Recorder of Objects in C (BAROC) formatted queries that a BMC Event Manager cell understands.

    Note

    The BAROC format is a proprietary BMC Event Manager query language.

Communicating with a BEM cell

To communicate with a BMC Event Manager cell, the adapter's underlying APIs, IMAP, and IMCOMM API require access to the mcell.dir file. The mcell.dir file for the BMC Event Manager application is located at installHome\pw\server\etc in the BMC Impact Administration Server installation directory.

You can use the mcell.dir file on the application (BEM) side as a reference to create or copy the mcell.dir file required by TrueSight Orchestration, which is then placed on the TrueSight Orchestration peer on which the adapter is enabled. The path to access this local file must be present in the adapter configuration.

The mcell.dir file contains the following cell definitions:

• cell name
• host
• port
• encryption key
• host2
• port2

If the cell name changes on the application (BEM) side, you must make corresponding changes in the mcell.dir file in BEM and the copy of the mcell.dir file that is local to the TrueSight Orchestration peer to ensure that the actor adapter continues to communicate with the cell.

You must disable and re-enable the adapter after the changes are made to the mcell.dir file local to the TrueSight Orchestration peer.

In case you also use the monitor adapter and change the cell name on the application (BEM) side, you must set up event monitoring for the new cell again as described in Setting up events for the TrueSight Orchestration Monitor Adapter for BEM.