IBM Integration Bus / IBM App Connect Enterprise Policies

This section provides details of the supplied IBM IIB/ACE policies and events for monitoring of the IBM Integration Bus (IIB) or IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) to enable you to customize them for your specific environment.

If you simply want to get started using the policy as quickly as possible (with no customization), see Getting-started-with-policies. In order to gain a better understanding of policies, see Policy architecture.

Policy and Event Pack Content

This particular Policy and Event Pack contains a series of Triggers, Action Pipelines, and Templates for detecting and notifying you of events related to IBM IIB/ACE technology as monitored by MVMM. While this documentation does not provide true documentation of each trigger, a few words on naming conventions should help you to understand.

The heart of the Policy and Event Pack is a series of Triggers to detect various key conditions on IBM IIB/ACE objects as monitored by MVMM. The naming convention for Policy and Event Pack Triggers is Technology_ObjectType_TriggerCondition. Thus, the IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_PoolUsageHigh trigger detects the condition where the configured pool of Message Flow Instances is nearly all used for a particular message flow.

For each Trigger, there are three provided Templates offering different notification mechanisms. Templates of the form TriggerName_BEM will send an event message (via msend) to BMC Event Manager when the TriggerName condition is met. Note that this uses the BEM_Generic Action Pipeline and does require the configuration of the integration between the MVMM Server and a BEM Cell in order to operate. Templates of the form TriggerName_Console will produce an alert in the Middleware Monitor Console Event pane when the TriggerName condition is met using the standard consoleAlert Action Pipeline (part of the base MVMM product). Note that some triggers use Delta conditions that preclude the use of Console Alerts. For those triggers, no TriggerName_Console template is provided. Finally, templates of the form TriggerName_LogToFile will append an event message to the specified log file (logToFile_Generic.log in the MVMM home directory by default) when the TriggerName condition is met.

Event Triggers and Templates

There are many triggers and templates, to obtain a list of the triggers and templates contained in this zip use the following command being careful to use the -n option to prevent an actual import. It is recommended you redirect the output to a file and use an editor to search for desired triggers or templates. Both the triggers and templates follow a naming convention beginning with IBM_ACE_<object type>_<trigger condition>.

mqsimport -n --exclude-associations --event-trigger ".*" --event-template ".*" Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip -p BMCSOFTWARE SA

Agent Policies

IBM_ACE_Agents_ALL_BEM
IBM_ACE_Agents_ALL_Email
IBM_ACE_Agent_ALL_Ext_Preferences
IBM_ACE_Agents_ALL_LogToFile
IBM_ACE_Agents_Basic
IBM_ACE_Agents_Minimal
IBM_ACE_Agents_Standard_BEM
IBM_ACE_Agents_Standard_EMail
IBM_ACE_Agents_Standard_LogToFile

Using the Policy and Event Pack

The Event Pack contains a zip file produced by mqsexport. To use the Event Pack objects run the mqsimport command. Depending on which portions of the Event pack you want to use, the command may vary. It is assumed that you will have knowledge of the mqsimport command to customize, but below are some sample commands:

To import the entire Event Pack, use the following command:
mqsimport --policy-read-only Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip SA
To import no policies and all the event triggers and templates, use the following command:
mqsimport --event-template IBM_ACE_.* --event-trigger IBM_ACE_.* Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip SA

To import all templates and triggers for a specific object type, use the following command (sample for a Message Flow):
mqsimport --event-template IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_.* --event-trigger IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_.* Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip SA
To import all triggers but only the templates associated with a particular action, use the following command (sample for BEM):
mqsimport --event-action-pipeline .*_Generic --event-template IBM_ACE_.*_BEM --event-trigger IBM_ACE_.* Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip SA
To import one specific trigger and template, use the following command (sample for IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_NotRunning_BEM):
mqsimport --event-action-pipeline BEM_Generic --event-template IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_NotRunning_BEM --event-trigger IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_NotRunning Samples/EventPacks/IBM_ACE/IBM_ACE_EventPack.zip SA

IBM_ACE_Agents_Minimal

As is typical for the supplied agent policies, the Minimal level for IBM IIB/ACE monitoring references the basic monitoring for the MVMM agents and extensions and then turns on historical collection at the top level.

Because IBM Integration Bus / IBM App Connect Enterprise is about the connection of different applications, this information is more extensive than for most minimal level policies.

The IBM_ACE_Agents_Minimal agent policy references one Object Policy Group (IBM_ACE_POLICY_Minimal), which in turn, references a nested Object Policy Group called IBM_ACE_ResourceManagers_Minimal that turns on history collection using the SAMPLE History Template at the Summary level for all Resource Managers (as shown below), which provides you trending data on the use of each of the major communication pools from the Integration Node (MQ, JMS, SOAP, FTP, and so on).

Note

In order to be standard, the IBM_ACE_ResourceManagers_Minimal Object Policy Group contains an Object Policy for all supported Resource Manager types. Of course, you can remove the Object Policies for types that you do not use from your copy of the Object Policy Group.

To remove the Object Policy:

Select the Object Policy that you do not want to use and click the Remove button.

IBM_ACE_Agents_Basic

The IBM_ACE_Agents_Basic agent policy contains an IBM_ACE_ResourceManagers_Basic Object Policy Group. This is more extensive than the IBM_ACE_ResourceManagers_Minimal. While it activates history using the SAMPLE History Template for each Resource Manager type, it does so not just at the Summary level for the type, but also for each instance of the type. In addition, the IBM_ACE_POLICY_Basic adds three Object Policies to turn on history collection using the SAMPLE History Template for Integration Servers, Message Flows, and Nodes, respectively, as shown below.

IBM_ACE_Agents_Standard_EventTarget

The Standard level of IBM IIB/ACE monitoring contains an Object Policy Group to reference all instances of all Resource Manager types and sets events for those. In addition to adding history on those resource managers as with the Basic level, it registers event templates against each type. While those types are too numerous to walk through individually here, the idea should be clear so that you can add or remove Policy Actions from the individual Object policies in that Group (or remove the whole object policy from the Group) according to your needs.

The IBM_ACE_POLICY_Standard_EventTarget Object Policy Group also includes Object Policies referencing all of the Integration Node and all of its key descendant types (Applications, Libraries, Integration Servers, and Message Flows). Each of those Object Policies sets up history on all objects of the type using the SAMPLE History Template and registers the a set of events notifying of key conditions.

For example, as shown above, you can see that the IBM_ACE_MessageFlow_Standard_BEM Object Policy adds associates each message flow with alerts when a Backout occurs, when the Message Flow uses High CPU, when the message flow is disabled by an administrative action, when an Error occurs, when Flow Stats are turned off (so that performance statistics from the flow will not be reporting), when the flow is using all of its available instances (MaxThreadsReached) or more than a threshold percentage (PoolUsageHigh), when the flow appears active but no performance data is arriving (Non-Responsive), when someone has turned Service or User Trace on, or when the time to process messages exceeds a threshold.

Clicking the Select button allows you to add additional Policy Actions to this Object Policy while selecting an existing Policy Action and clicking the Remove button will no longer apply that Policy Action. You can also change the individual thresholds for events.

IBM_ACE_Agents_ALL_EventTarget

The ALL level of IBM IIB/ACE monitoring contains everything done by the Standard level, and then adds two additional Event Templates to Message Flows (Node Level Statistic are on, which might create a high load on MVMM, and one to separate MQ Errors from other message flow errors).

Where to go from here

Now that you have imported the Policy and Event Pack for this technology, go to Getting started with policies to enable them.