Availability alerts using situations

When creating an availability alert or creating a workspace focused on z/OS availability, it may be useful to create some alerts focused on the availability of key tasks. I showed and example earlier of how you can use the integration of System Automation (SA) with the TEP to create an intelligent task/resource availability alert based upon the logic encoded within SA.

What if you do not have SA? What are ways to create some task availability alerts? One easy starting point is to use OMEGAMON z/OS, and to create address space alerts using the situation support for the 'Missing' function. In the example I show, if any of the tasks in the list are detected by the situation to be missing, an alert will fire.

This is an offshoot of the Key Task light from the OMEGAMON MVS CUA interface. The advantage of using the TEP and situations are two-fold. First, you can add additional logic in a situation that you cannot have in the basic Key Task light in CUA. The second thing is that you can make situations time of day sensitive a couple ways. One is to add time sensitivity into the situation logic. Another way is to manage the situations using policies to start/stop them.

Using policies to start and stop situations based upon the needs of the installation is a powerful, and easy to use technique. You can manage the alert, make it time sensitive, and not have to code all the logic into the situation. Just let the policy manage it.