Associate monitors with CIs through the administrator console

The Associate Monitors feature in the administrator console provides the ability to associate any monitor and its events with any CI by using an alias.

Monitor to CI alias overview

An alias uniquely identifies the CI. A CI can have multiple aliases. Every CI in Infrastructure Management has an alias attribute and a value associated with it. The value of the alias attribute is set when you create the CI. If an alias is not supplied, the ID is used as the alias. The CI ID is auto-generated. The alias attribute has the following characteristics:

• A token ID integrates the attributes of the CI. The alias can also be the token ID. 
• The alias can be auto-generated or entered manually. 
• You can only associate a monitor with one CI. 
• A monitor only can associate one alias to the CI, even when the CI has multiple aliases.
  This is important in a scalable deployment scenario where the same alias is used on multiple servers. 
• The alias is used in event to CI associations.
  When an event is generated on a metric that the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server is monitoring, the alias for the event is the alias used for the monitor to CI mapping. This alias is traced to a CI and the ID slot of the event is filled. If no matching CI is found, based on the alias, the event is associated with a device.

Associating monitors with CIs in the service model view

You can create a service model by creating components in the administrator console.

In the service model view, you can perform the following tasks for a CI:

• Add monitors to the list by selecting monitor type, then monitor instance. 
• Delete monitors from the list by selecting one or more and then pressing delete or unassociate. 

• Select a group, and then all monitors in that group are added to the list.

After associating all of the monitors and adapter monitors, verify that the monitors and adapter monitors are associated to the appropriate components.

Associate a monitor with a CI when the CI Alias is unknown to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server

A CI exists but is unknown to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server when the CI exists in the CMDB, but the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server has not yet synced with the CMDB.

In this case, you can find the alias in the BMC Atrium Explorer, and enter the alias in the monitor edit page.
There are some instances where associating a monitor to a CI alias that is unknown to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server is desirable. For example,

• If you add the data collection (devices, monitors) before you add the service model, you can set the aliases when the monitors are created. 
• If you have multiple BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Servers with one or more child servers collecting data and feeding events to a parent or master BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server, you can associate a monitor to a CI alias on a child server.
  The CI alias need not exist on the child server, either. If the child server does not have a service model, the monitor's events are not associated to a CI on the child server. However, when the event is propagated to the parent or master BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server, the CI alias for the event is resolved to a CI alias in the service model on the parent or master BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.

To associate a monitor with a CI when the CI alias is unknown to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server:

1. In the administrator console, select a Infrastructure Management native monitor or an adapter monitor and click Edit.
   The Edit window opens and provides fields for the CI ID and CI Alias.
2. In the CI ID and CI Alias fields, enter the values for the component ID and aliases.
   The component is now associated with the monitor or adapter monitor selected.

Use cases

By default, Infrastructure Management devices are associated with the Computer System configuration item (CI). Also by default, a native abnormality event is associated with the monitor of the Infrastructure Management device's Computer System CI, unless mc_smc_alias is set for the event. In some cases, you might want to associate the monitor's event with a different CI. For example, a higher level CI, such as Business Service, or a more granular CI under the Computer System CI.

The following examples illustrate how you can use this feature:

• Associate a monitor's events with a higher-level CI
  A monitor might collect metrics that represent the overall health of a service or application, for example, sales volume per minute. By default, any event on the monitor is associated with the monitor's parent device. However, you might want to associate the monitor to a higher level CI. For example, Business Services. 
• Associate a monitor's events with a more granular CI
  A service model might break a device into a ComputerSystem CI plus other lower-level CI components. However, you might want events on the device's monitors associated with a more granular CI. For example, if Infrastructure Management is monitoring a database server, you could associate the database monitors with the Database CI, and not with the Computer System CI.