About Policies

Policies are an interesting and powerful feature of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Common usages of policies include such things as enabling a situation to issue multiple commands when true, stopping and starting situations as needed, and using multiple checks and command options with a single command flow. Policies provide a way to expand the command capabilities of the Tivoli Portal.

There are some things to consider when using policies. First, be aware that situations that are embedded within the policy logic are 'copies' of the original situation. In other words, if you take a commonly used situation and embed it within a policy, that situation logic will be run twice, once for the situation itself, and once for the policy. That, in and of itself, may not be a problem. But, be aware that if you are using a higher cost situation in a policy, you will be using that higher cost situation twice. Second, situations usually run within the agent task, but policies run within the TEMS infrastructure. Third, similar to the interval concept of situations, policies also have an inherent loop execution logic.

To know if any policies are connected to a given managed system, you can right click on the managed system within the Tivoli Portal and select 'Manage policies' to see what policies have been deployed.