Integrating MDist2 database with ITM 6.1

'One TEC to rule them all, One Console to find them,
One UA to bring them all and in the workspace bind them.???????????????

If J.R.R Tolkien were a Tivoli Specialist, his epic would be little different :-) ITM 6.1, no matter how much you hate/love it, provides a way to realize Tolkien's dream. You can integrate many custom applications to ITM using universal agents and there by creating one console (TEPS) to view all the application monitoring information. In this article, we will discuss how to integrate Tivoli's MDist2 database to TEPS.

Framework's MDist2 database contains useful information about the distributions initiated by Tivoli applications such as ITM (5.x), Inventory or Software Distribution. Tivoli provides a separate GUI tool (wmdistgui) to display this information in detail. However, in many cases, you might want to display the mdist2 information in TEPS console instead due to the following reasons.

Eliminates the need for multiple consoles.

Distributions can be closely monitored and situations can be created to automatically alert the necessary people when a major distribution failure occurs.

It is a small step (a Hobbit's step?) towards realizing Tolkien's dreams.

The sample screen shot shows our first stab in this integration.



The sample MDL is shown below. The SQL itself is straight forward, we are selecting only the required columns and we compute the 'Failure Percentage'within the SQL itself.


//APPL Tivoli_Mdist
//NAME DIST_STATE K 300
//SOURCE ODBC Sample user=someuser pswd=somepass
//SQL Select SOURCE_APPLICATION APPLICATION,ID,LABEL,DIST_SIZE,START_TIME,FINISH_TIME,TARGET_COUNT TARGETS,COMPLETED_COUNT COMPLETED,SUCCESSFUL_COUNT SUCCESSFUL,FAILED_COUNT FAILED, INT(FAILED_COUNT * 1.0/TARGET_COUNT * 100) FAILURE_RATE, UNAVAILABLE_COUNT UNAVAILABLE,WAITING_COUNT WAITING,PAUSED_COUNT PAUSED,RECEIVING_COUNT RECEIVING,INTERRUPTED_COUNT INTERRUPTED,SENDING_COUNT SENDING,CANCELED_COUNT CANCELED,REJECTED_COUNT REJECTED,EXPIRED_COUNT EXPIRED from DIST_STATE
//ATTRIBUTES
APPLICATION D 252
ID D 32 KEY
LABEL D 252
DIST_SIZE C 999999
START_TIME D 28
FINISH_TIME D 28
TARGETS C 999999
COMPLETED C 999999
SUCCESSFUL C 999999
FAILED C 999999
FAILURE_RATE C 9999
UNAVAILABLE C 999999
WAITING C 999999
PAUSED C 999999
RECEIVING C 999999
INTERRUPTED C 999999
SENDING C 999999
CANCELED C 999999
REJECTED C 999999
EXPIRED C 999999


Customizing workspace

Once we imported the above MDL into UA, the workspace customization is no big deal. It all depends on what you want to see in the workspace. In this sample workspace, we have separate views for Inventory and Software Distribution information and a situation to alert if the failure percentage exceeds 20% for any distribution and a bar chart that displays the failure rate for the last 100 distributions.

Hope you find it useful.