Features of the Infrastructure Management and BMC PATROL Agent integration

The following are the key features that the integration of the Infrastructure Management and BMC PATROL Agent provides:

• • Reduction of footprint
  • Reliable collection of data
  • Self health monitoring
  • Event integration
  • Event with monitor association
  • Streaming
  • Reduction in the number of processes that were running

Reduction of footprint

The Infrastructure Management architecture offers minimal footprint and maximum scalability. For example, the size of the Integration Service installation executable has reduced because of the Infrastructure Management and BMC PATROL Agent integration, which in turn, decreases the time taken to install the Integration Service. The integration also offers better performance and scalability numbers. For a description of this feature using a use case, see Utilize-minimal-footprint-with-maximum-scalability.

Reliable collection of data

The BMC PATROL Agent offers reliable collection of data by guaranteeing delivery of event data and instance data to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. Data is sent by the PATROL Agent to the Integration Service, which then transfers the data to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. The behavior of data delivery depends on the type of data to be sent. In Infrastructure Management, data can be divided into three types:

• Performance data (also known as statistical data)
• Event data
• Instance data: data of each instance in Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure Management introduces an acknowledgement mechanism whereby the PATROL Agent receives an acknowledgement for the data it sends. This acknowledgement mechanism varies depending on the type of data being sent by the PATROL Agent. This mechanism is applicable if the BMC PATROL Agent or any component of Infrastructure Management goes down during execution. The acknowledgement mechanism applies only to instance data and event data.

Self health monitoring

You can monitor the health of all the components of Infrastructure Management. The ability to monitor the health of the Infrastructure Management components is called self health monitoring. Self health monitoring includes monitoring the health of:

• BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server
• Integration Service
• BMC PATROL Agent

The health of a component is usually affected by resource depletion which can occur because of a heavy load on the resources or because of crossing scalability limits. Resource monitoring can provide early insights into the health of a component and makes it possible to measure the load on components such as instances, attributes, and so on.  This in turn, provides an early insight into scalability issues. You can view the health of any component from the ProactiveNet Health node in the Operations Console. For more information, see Viewing-the-health-of-the-Infrastructure-Management-components. For a description of this feature using a use case, see Detect-problems-using-the-automated-self-health-monitoring-capability.

Event integration

The BMC PATROL Agent can forward events to its consumers through two channels:

• Channel through the Integration Service
  In this channel, an event shares the same channel that is available for data streaming. All the events that are triggered and filtered to pass are routed through the Integration Service. The event response acknowledgement is implemented in the BMC PATROL Agent to guarantee the delivery of the event to consumers, which in this case is Infrastructure Management.
• Separate Channel through IMGW
  In this channel, an event is pushed to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server Cell that uses propagate rules to forward the event to one or more destination cells or gateways. The BMC PATROL Agent has a dependency on the IMGW library interface for the message acknowledgement mechanism. Guaranteed delivery is available only between two peer IMGW interfaces.

Event with monitor association

You can configure BMC PATROL and Infrastructure Management such that events are sent from BMC PATROL to the Integration Service. The Integration Service then routes these events to the cell. The BMC PATROL event reaches the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server through the cell and is then displayed in the operator console. You can then perform any event operation on the BMC PATROL events (such as Probable Cause Analysis) and drill-down to the root cause to troubleshoot the issue. In earlier Infrastructure Management versions, only intelligent events could be viewed in the Operations Console.

For a description of this feature using a use case, see Perform-Probable-Cause-Analysis-on-events-generated-by-the-BMC-PATROL-Agent.

Streaming

The BMC PATROL Agent pushes the data as and when it collects it, to Infrastructure Management. That is, data is directly streamed from the BMC PATROL Agent to Infrastructure Management without buffering, thus minimizing the latency for data, events, and instance information to reach the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.

Reduction in the number of processes that were running

Only one Infrastructure Management process, the Integration Service process, runs in the background when you use Infrastructure Management. This reduces the number of possible failure points, and makes the architecture more robust.