Can the Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) be your enterprise dashboard?

I've been asked this question many times by customers and students. I've warmed up to the idea that - Yes, the TEP could be your enterprise portal for systems management data.

Here we will talk about some of the options and this could accomplished.

If you are ITM 6.1 customer - you have the Tivoli Enteprise Portal, how you've implemented is another story. For the first time in Tivoli history, we have a mechanism to display realtime, historical and non-Tivoli data - heck for the first time we can actually display Tivoli data.

The views in the TEP are essentially powered by SQL queries to various data sources, like the TEMS or the Tivoli Data Warehouse. However, there is also a generic ODBC interface that can populate any view with data from any ODBC registered database.

So let's create a scenario. My boss wants to see realtime performance data in one workspace, historical in another and a combination of events, historical CPU performance and change management information for all Linux servers from our change management database.

The realtime performance data and historical data Workspaces are provided out of the box. Although you may want to customize just a tad. But the chanage management data is in an MSSQL database and those DBA's don't want to export data for me, so what shall a simple boy like me do?

Have no fear - Underdog is here.

First create a new ODBC entry in your Windows TEP server ODBC settings that connects to the database you want (you will need a user id with read permissions), yes Windows - this will only work on a Windows TEP server - surprise... If it can be done on other platforms - I haven't found it yet.

Second, modify your TEPS Environment to include the DSN you just registered.

Third, create a new query in the TEPS and assign it to a view in a workspace.

Not sure how to do these steps - check back each day this week for tips on each one of these.