BMC Patrol Metrics Monitor

The SiteScope BMC Patrol Metrics allows you to collect measurements collected by Patrol Agents.

Usage Guidelines

Use the Patrol Monitor to collect all the measurements monitored by Patrol Agents both on NT and UNIX machines. You can monitor multiple parameters or counters with a single monitor instance. This allows you to watch server loading for performance, availability, and capacity planning. Create a separate monitor instance for each Patrol Agent in your environment.

The Patrol Monitor connects to the Patrol Agent using Patrol-provided libraries (Patrol Agent API). You will also need to know the Patrol's user name, user password, port number used to connect to the Patrol Agent.

Prerequisites

Patrol Agent/Console must be installed on the SiteScope machine (enabling the use of the Patrol Agent Open API). Use the following steps to enable the BMC Patrol Metrics Monitor to the list of monitor types in SiteScope.

To install the Patrol Agent/Console

The Patrol monitor requires access to the file pemapi.dll. This file is available as part of either the BMC Patrol Agent or the BMC Patrol Console, and is usually located in the <%PATROL_HOME>/bin folder. To ensure that the monitor can access the file, you specify the path to the file, unless the location of the file is already specified in the %PATH% (search path).
If the location of the pemapi.dll file is not specified in the search path, run the following command from the command line on the SiteScope machine:
<Topaz CD>\tools and utilities\Ems\TopazEmsMonitors\BMC_PatrolMonitor install.bat <SiteScope_install_path> -pemdir <path_to_pemapi.dll_folder>
If the pemapi.dll file is located in the search path, run the following command from the command line on the SiteScope machine:
<Topaz CD>\tools and utilities\Ems\TopazEmsMonitors\BMC_PatrolMonitor install <SiteScope_install_path>.
Stop and start the SiteScope service.

Note: In order to run this monitor, the SiteScope service should run with a user account definition (not Local System account).

The default run schedule for this monitor is every 10 minutes, but you can change it to run more or less often using the Update every setting.

Note: It is recommended that you use Verify Error under the Advanced Options section in order to detect network problem while connecting to the Patrol Agent machine.

Diagnostics

You can use the PatrolDiag application to check that communication is available to a BMC Patrol Agent and that the Patrol monitor installation was performed correctly.

To verify connectivity to the Patrol Agent(s):

After installing the Patrol monitor, open a command prompt window, and change the working directoy to the <SiteScope install>\SiteScope\bin directory.
Run the Patrol connection diagnostic, PatrolDiag, with the following command line syntax:
PatrolDiag <server name> <user name> <port number>

where the command line arguments are defined as follows:
- <server name> - targeted BMC Patrol Agent computer name
- <user name> - Patrol user name with permissions to contact the above Patrol Agent
- <port number> - Patrol Agent connection port
- <password> - Patrol user password (at interactive state)
If the connection is successful, the PatrolDiagXmlData.xml file is created under the current directory. This file describes the measurements sampled by the Patrol Agent. In addition five results of CPU Processor Time Percent are printed.
If the connection fails, an error message is reported. Additional information is available in the PatrolMon.log file.

Completing the Patrol Monitor Form

To display the Patrol Monitor Form, either click the Edit link for an existing Patrol Monitor in a monitor table, or click the Add a new Monitor to this Group link on a group's detail page and click the Add Patrol Monitor link.

Complete the items on the Patrol Monitor form as follows. When the required items are complete, click the Add Monitor button.

Server: Choose the server you want to monitor. Use the choose server link to view a list of servers or to enter a path name. On UNIX servers, enter the full pathname of the database server.
Counters: Choose the server performance parameters or counters you want to check with this monitor. The table list to the right of this item displays those currently selected for this monitor. Use the choose counters link to bring up the counters selection screen. Check or clear the check boxes on the choose counters screen to select between one to ten counters to monitor on this server.
Update every: Select how often the monitor should check the Database server. The default interval is to run or update the monitor once every 10 minutes. Use the drop-down list to the right of the text box to specify another update interval in increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The update interval must be 15 seconds or longer.
Title (Optional): Enter a title text for this monitor. This text is displayed in the group detail page, in report titles, and other places in the SiteScope interface. If you do not enter a title text, SiteScope will create a title based on the host, server, or URL being monitored.

Advanced Options

The Advanced Options section presents a number of ways to customize monitor behavior and display. Use this section to customize error and warning thresholds, disable the monitor, set monitor-to-monitor dependencies, customize display options, and enter other monitor specific settings required for special infrastructure environments. The options for this monitor type are described below. Complete the entries as needed and click the Add or Update button to save the settings.

Disable: Check this box to temporarily disable this monitor and any associated alerts. To enable the monitor again, clear the box.
Verify Error: Check this box if you want SiteScope to automatically run this monitor again if it detects an error.
Update Every (on error): You use this option to set a new monitoring interval for monitors that have registered an error condition. For example, you may want SiteScope to monitor this item every 10 minutes normally, but as often as every 2 minutes if an error has been detected. Note that this increased scheduling will also affect the number of alerts generated by this monitor.
Schedule (Optional): By default, SiteScope's monitors are enabled every day of the week. You may, however, schedule your monitors to run only on certain days or on a fixed schedule. Choose the Edit schedule link to create or edit a monitor schedule. For more information about working with monitor schedules, see the section on Schedule Preferences for Monitoring.
Monitor Description (Optional): Enter additional information about this monitor. The description will appear on the Monitor Detail page.
Report Description (Optional): Enter an optional description for this monitor that will make it easier to understand what the monitor does. For example, network traffic or main server response time. This description will be displayed on with each bar chart and graph in Management Reports and appended to the tool-tip displayed when you pass the mouse cursor over the status icon for this monitor on the monitor detail page.
Depends On (Optional): To make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor or monitor group, use the drop-down list to select the monitor or group on which this monitor is dependent. Select None to remove any dependency.
Depends Condition (Optional): If you choose to make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor, select the status condition that the other monitor or monitor group should have in order for the current monitor to run normally. The current monitor will be run normally as long as the monitor or group on which it depends reports the condition selected in this option.
List Order (Optional): By default, new monitors are listed last on the Monitor Detail page. You may use this drop-down list to choose a different placement for this monitor.

Setting Monitor Status Thresholds

Some Integration monitors allow you to set multiple threshold conditions to determine the status reported by each monitor. The individual conditions are combined as logical OR relationships so that when one or more of the conditions (for example any of the conditions for Error if) are met the monitor status is set to the applicable condition. If multiple conditions are met for more than one status condition (such as conditions for both error and for warning), the status for the monitor is set to the highest valued condition. Thus a match of an error condition and a warning condition would be reported as an error status, error being the highest value, warning the next highest and good the lowest value.

Error if: Use one or more of the selection boxes in this item to define one or more error conditions for this monitor. Use the drop-down lists in these items to change error threshold(s) relative to the counters you have selected to check with this monitor. After choosing a counter or parameter, use the comparison operator drop-down list to specify an error threshold such as: >= (greater than or equal to), != (not equal to), or < (less than) and enter a comparison value in the box provided. Comparison values should be entered as whole numbers.
Warning if: Use one or more of the selection boxes in this item to define one or more warning conditions for this monitor. Use the drop-down lists in these items to change warning threshold(s) relative to the counters you have selected to check with this monitor. Set these values relative to those you set for the error threshold in the Error if item.
Good if: You can set this monitor to return a good status for certain conditions. You may define those conditions here. Complete this item as you would for the Error if and Warning if items.