This chapter provides an overview of the integration of Tivoli products.

This chapter contains the following topics:

When using unintegrated point products from multiple vendors together, you might have the following concerns:

Based on these concerns, Tivoli development started an integration initiative that provides a guideline about how to converge the products to a common set of rules to allow the products to work together. IBM is implementing this initiative with each product release to enhance the overall integration and all these issues are being targeted by the integration initiatives.

Integration initiatives are as follows:

Security integration enables Tivoli products to integrate security aspects, such as authentication and single sign-on, shared user registry support, centralized user account management, consistent authorization, audit log consolidation, and compliance reporting.

Navigation initiatives allow seamless user interface transition between various Tivoli products when the context is needed. This seamless integration involves integrated user interface and launch in context abilities.

Data Integration provides for the communication of information across the product set. This includes the sharing of information about the managed environment and the management environment. Information about the managed environment includes elements such as computers, operating systems, applications, network, storage and other devices. Information about the management environment includes elements such as agents and server components.

The functional integration initiative provides guidance for developing integration modules (IMs) that can be used to automate the execution of selected process steps. An integration module is a piece of code specifically written to enable two products to be integrated to provide a specific function to a customer. IMs are programmatic interactions, not user interface transitions; however, in many cases, navigation and functional integration techniques such as launch-in-context (LIC) are used together to streamline a user's work across multiple products by automating certain tasks and increasing the effectiveness and productivity of the user for manual (or partially automated) tasks.

Manageability integration provides the data and interfaces that enable the assessment of system health in both operational and support environments (from availability, performance, and problem determination perspectives). One component of this integration is the Log Analyzer, which is used by clients to help identify the failing product component in the event of a problem.

Reporting integration provides centralized management reporting across various Tivoli products. This reporting integration is realized by using Tivoli Common Reporting.

Agent management allows self-monitoring of various Tivoli products using IBM Tivoli Monitoring agents.

In this book, we provide a guide for integrating Tivoli technologies based on these initiatives. We present this information in the context of a number of integration scenarios. Scenarios are collections of work items that typically depict how an operations group uses a set of products to achieve a solution. We derived the scenarios from common real-world examples.

Several aspects of integration and several approaches to achieve integration are available. We describe integration from the operator’s perspective. IBM provides multifaceted and deep integration among its products to provide a seamless experience for users and enable the automation of processes:

Within each aspect are separate levels of integration. For example, one aspect is navigation, which is the ability to move seamlessly between views provided by multiple related products. One level of navigation integration is “launch, where one product console can be launched from another. A deeper level of navigation integration is “launch-in-context, where the launched console starts in the same context that the user had in the launching console. A user might be looking at an event about a problem with a computer system and launch in context to another product console. When it comes up, it displays further information about that computer system. A deeper level of navigation integration is shared console, such as Tivoli Integrated Portal. The same console has panels with information from multiple products. When the user changes contexts in one panel, the other panels switch to the same context.

The following products address several of the common scenarios that we have identified: