1.2 Linking with Performance Management to monitor service status (working with Performance Management)

ITSLM can monitor the status of hosts and middleware that provide monitored services and the availability of the monitored services. To achieve this, ITSLM must be linked with Performance Management. Linking with Performance Management is not required. We recommend that you evaluate your need to link with Performance Management, as necessary.

You can achieve the following monitoring by linking ITSLM with Performance Management:

• Monitoring the performance of hosts and middleware

  ITSLM acquires information collected by Performance Management's monitoring agents, thus enabling you to monitor the performance of hosts and middleware in an ITSLM window. Because ITSLM enables you to monitor the performance of hosts and middleware based on threshold values, if an unusual service status is detected, you can use the ITSLM window to check the status of the hosts and middleware during the period in question. Based on this information, you can investigate and determine whether the cause was in a host or middleware.

  This monitoring is supported when PFM - Agent or PFM - RM is used as the monitoring agent.

• Monitoring service availability

  By monitoring the availability of services, you can determine whether services are being provided without interruption. You can also obtain availability-related evaluation metrics (SLO) based on the monitored availability data and check the availability in an ITSLM window.

  This monitoring is supported when PFM - Agent for Service Response is used.

  Important note

  ITSLM does not support job monitoring.

Example of predictive error detection in the performance of a monitored service and the investigative support methodology

This example uses the results obtained by monitoring hosts and middleware to determine the cause of a warning sign detected during monitoring of a service's performance.

This enterprise system has been using ITSLM to monitor service status. As the system has become increasingly complex, more and more time has been required to identify the causes of problems. Therefore, the current ITSLM monitoring system has been linked with Performance Management to monitor the status of hosts and middleware and to reduce the time required for identifying causes.

The following figure shows the general procedure for detecting a warning sign of an abnormality in the performance of a monitored service, and for taking an appropriate corrective action.

Figure 1‒9: General procedure for detecting a warning sign of an abnormality in the performance of a monitored service, and for taking an appropriate corrective action by linking ITSLM and Performance Management

First, use of ITSLM to monitor a service's status detects an increase in response time, which is a warning sign of an abnormality in service performance. Next, from ITSLM's past monitoring records, the timing of an event that might be the cause of the warning sign of an abnormality in service performance is checked. Then, the example checks the results of monitoring the host and middleware providing that service for any warning. If there is a warning, the example investigates further to determine the cause because that warning might have something to do with the change in service performance. For example, if CPU usage increased considerably at the time the warning sign of an abnormality in service performance was detected, the corresponding host's middleware information must be examined for any inefficient CPU usage in order to identify the cause.

If an appropriate corrective action was taken and ITSLM shows that the service level has recovered, the corrective action needed at the stage of the warning sign of an abnormality in the service performance is complete.

For this example, an example of setting up the monitored items is explained in 3.3.3 Example of setup for predictive error detection in the performance of systems running monitored services and the corrective action support methodology (working with Performance Management), and an example of execution of monitoring is explained in 4.6.3 Example of execution for predictive error detection in the performance of systems running monitored services and the corrective action support methodology (working with Performance Management).

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