Using Tivoli Monitoring Web Services

The Web Services support that is included as part of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) infrastructure, is a useful, but commonly overlooked component of the tool. Certain add on components, such as ITMSUPER, that I've talked about earlier use Web Services support. But, there is quite a bit more you can do with the Web Services capability.

IBM provides out of the box quite a few SOAP methods with IBM Tivoli Monitoring Web services. These methods allow you to dynamically query and control IBM Tivoli Monitoring
environments. Using IBM’s SOAP methods, you can:
- Stop or start policies and situations
- Forward trapped messages to Universal Message console
- Retrieve attribute data that you can display in charts or reports
- Open and close events
- Make real-time requests for monitoring agent data

The SOAP support can be employed as part of situation and policy support. You can also retrieve data and store it in the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW).

There are some supplied commands and tools you can use to test web services calls, and to get a better understading of what you can do with ITM monitoring and Web Services. I will next do a series of posts that cover Web Services, and how to set up and use them.