Perform Probable Cause Analysis on events generated by the BMC PATROL Agent

Mix Technologies is a large enterprise company in the Silicon space. It has the following deployment:

  • 5000 servers in the IT infrastructure
  • 1500 servers in a virtual environment using VMware
  • 500 servers in a public cloud environment

Mix Technologies monitors its network devices using events through SNMP. It also uses deep dive network topology tools. The rest of the application infrastructure and servers are monitored using application performance and traditional monitoring tools.The help desk personnel and application owners are responsible for monitoring and managing the servers in the private cloud as well. 

Roles required

There are many user roles involved in the deployment, operation, and management of Infrastructure Management. Your company may employ the roles as described below, consolidate them into fewer roles, or divide them into roles with more granular responsibilities and may have other titles for these roles.

The following role is required to complete this use case:

  • Roger - Distributed Service Operations User

Roger handles the following responsibilities:

  • Maintaining the ongoing performance and availability of production systems with a focus on server infrastructure
  • Performing administrative functions on servers and monitoring tools
  • Monitoring the performance and solving availability, performance, and capacity problems

Viewing events generated by the BMC PATROL Agent in the operator console and performing Probable Cause Analysis on such events

When a critical condition arises in the BMC PATROL environment, a critical event is generated by the BMC PATROL Agent. Roger wants this event to impact the corresponding configuration item (CI) in Infrastructure Management. After the critical condition is resolved, BMC PATROL generates an OK event. Roger wants the corresponding change in the event status to be reflected in Infrastructure Management. Roger also wants to view not only intelligent events but also events generated by the BMC PATROL Agent. He then wants to be able to perform Probable Cause Analysis on all events, drill-down to the root cause and troubleshoot the problem area. To do this, Roger must:

  1. Add an Integration Service using Central Monitoring Administration.
  2. Add the PATROL Agent to Infrastructure Management using Central Monitoring Administration.
  3. Configure the PATROL Agent to send events.
  4. Set up thresholds for the PATROL Agent.
  5.  Log on to the operator console and click Devices in the navigation tree. Click the Grid view. The PATROL Agent that you configured displays in the All Devices page. You can view the PATROL Agent, events generated by the PATROL Agent, and the severity of these events. For more information about the All Devices page, see Viewing-further-information-for-All-Devices.
  6. Click the PATROL Agent device name. The Show Monitors page is displayed. This page displays all the KMs or processes that are monitored by the PATROL Agent. You can drill-down to view the process that displays warning and critical events. Click the event status icon to view the details of that event in the events list.
    all_monitors.PNG
  7. You can then perform Probable-Cause-Analysis on these events to determine the most likely cause for the event to be generated.

 

 

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