Combining IBM Director and IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) integrates a best of breed hardware monitor and an enterprise level systems management tool to provide visualization, control and automation. ITM visualizes all the enterprise monitored data through the Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP). This provides a common graphical interface to visualize all hardware and software activities.

ITM consolidates all this monitored data into the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW). This data is then summarized and pruned to provide a cost effective, historical context to control a customer's infrastructure. Automation, provided by a drag-and-drop workflow capability, captures a company's best practices for execution upon a hardware or software event.

Tivoli Monitoring is a dynamic, end-to-end monitoring solution for proactively managing the performance and availability of the entire IT infrastructure monitoring resources across the enterprise in an agent or agent-less fashion.

With this integration, IBM Director is an integral component in an   e extensiveeextensive end-to-end solution from Windows to System z and all the platforms in-between such as AIX, Linux, SUN and HP. It is integrated into a top-to-bottom solution reaching down into the hardware through the application layer and transactions that matter to the business, including the infrastructure in-between such as virtual machines, middleware software, clusters, databases and directories.

By bringing these two environments together, customers can reduce the mean time to recovery with visualization, automation and event correlation based on consolidated hardware and software information. Hardware specialists can specialize in a tool, such as IBM Director, targeted to their requirements while consolidating and forwarding this information into an enterprise monitoring solution.

Integration of IBM Director into an IBM Tivoli Monitoring Environment

This article uses parts of a whitepaper to show how IBM Director is integrated with and enhanced by unique IBM Tivoli Monitoring capabilities.

IBM Director forwards critical hardware information into a rich enterprise systems management tool. IBM Tivoli Monitoring captures, stores and displays this information in context of the entire monitored infrastructure.

ITM integration provides:

• A uniform visualization of availability and performance information from specialized hardware information to operating system metrics through end-user application and transaction performance.
• A consistent automation process for capturing and executing best practices in a repetitive and error-free manner through workflow management
• A control mechanism through an Enterprise Data Warehouse for historical data collection and presentation
• A hardware forecasting capability through the performance analytics of IBM Tivoli Performance Analyzer.

ITM also links IBM Director into a complete, integrated availability management solutions:

• Event management - Reduce mean-time-to-recovery by bypassing "situational events" to get to the "root cause" of a problem with IBM Tivoli OMNIbus, IBM Tivoli Network Manager Entry Edition or Tivoli Enterprise Console
• Composite Application Management - Proactively recognize and resolve transaction performance problems with Tivoli Composite Application Manager
• Service Level Management - Capture and monitor service level agreements while anticipating service level adjustments with Tivoli Service Level Advisor
• Business Service Management - Apply a business context to your infrastructure. When there are multiple outages, quickly prioritize service based on the importance to the business. In other words, start aligning and managing IT in the context of business priorities.

With IBM Tivoli Monitoring, customers can monitor a broad product portfolio

The Role of IBM Director

IBM Director delivers a cross-platform hardware management solution across IBM server environments including System x, System i, System p and System z.

Integration into IBM Tivoli Monitoring provides IBM Director customers with a complete systems management view. IBM Director customers get access to an end-to-end and top-to-bottom monitoring view, event correlation across the entire IT infrastructure, composite applications, network, service level and business services management.

Integration of IBM Director into IBM Tivoli Monitoring

Hardware Monitoring

IBM Director Core Services is installed on managed systems to provide hardware-specific functionality for Director to communicate with and administer the managed systems. It provides management entirely through standard protocols. The Director Core Services package installs CIMOM (on Linux) or CIM mapping libraries to WMI (on Windows), and platform-specific instrumentation; it registers itself with the Director CIM Object Manager to receive events/indications as they happen.

On the managed system, Director Core Services can monitor the condition of a system environment (such as fan, system enclosure, temperature, and voltage) and the system hardware status (such as memory module, I/O module, chassis, CPU, power supply, disk drive, and backplane).

Integrated Architecture

Adding IBM Director to the IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment enables rich management from a single console, a uniform set of automation workflows and centralized and integrated historical data. The IBM Tivoli Monitoring agent for IBM Director enables this integration. It is available on the IBM Tivoli Open Process Automation (OPAL) Library web site at http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/tm.

With this rich integration environment, complex problems are much simpler to anticipate, visualize, control, automate, understand and resolve.

The Tivoli Monitoring Datasheet can be found HERE

This article has used some of the information available as whitepaper from your Tivoli representative. At a later date this whitpaper will also be released on the web (in pdf format).