AND and OR logic in situations

In my webcast last week a couple questions came up about AND and OR logic in the Tivoli Portal.  AND/OR logic comes into the Portal in a variety of ways.  First let's look at a situation example.

In the example below, I've built a situation that looks at a combination of CPU percent and address space name.  In other words the situation will fire only if CPU Percent is within a certain range, and only for certain Job Names.  Note that I've added CPU Percent twice which allows me to do a range, in other words CPU Percent has to be above 1% AND less than 5% AND the alert will only apply to Job Names starting with CXE.  To add OR logic I would add information into line 2 and line 3, as space allows within the situation editor.

Submitting a batch job from an OMEGAMON situation action command

Situation alerts are often the most effective mechanism to use in OMEGAMON to generate alerts.  Situations offer the most flexibility, any item of information that appears in a portal workspace may typically be incorporated into a situation alert. 

Plus, situations may drive automated actions.  If a situation is true, the situation may be enabled to issue a command.  In the context of z/OS, that would mean a command to the z/OS console.

But, what if instead of a z/OS console command you want to submit a batch job?  Well, you can do that too.  Here's how.  It uses a method similar to how IMS starts message regions by using IEBGENR to read JCL and send the JCL to an internal reader.

In the following example we see a policy with an action command.  In this example, the policy is issuing a command to start a PROC called POTWKLD, and passing the member name to submit (meaning the batch job to submit), in this example the job is in member DB2READI.  You also see an example of what the PROC looks like, and how it is set up to pass the member name to submit the batch JCL.

That's it!  This technique will work with a situation action, just as it does here with a policy action.

Another handy navigation technique in the e3270ui

As a follow on to the earlier navigation post, here's another handy little navigation technique.  When you are logged to the e3270ui, from whatever panel you are looking at if you press F9 some navigation push buttons will appear at the bottom of the panel.

Here's an example (see below).  I'm on the main KOBSTART panel.  I have just pressed F9, and now navigation push buttons have appeared at the bottom of the screen.  To navigate, position the cursor on the button, and press enter.  This should work from any panel in e3270ui.

Some handy navigation shortcuts in the e3270ui

There are some handy cross product navigation techniques available in the e3270ui.  One of the convenient aspects of the e3270ui is the ability to switch between monitoring tools (for example from DB2 to CICS, or CICS to z/OS, etc.) quickly and easily.  In Classic interface you may have to have multiple sessions going in multiple emulator windows to switch cross tool. 

In the e3270ui you may have noticed an entry on the tool bar line that says Navigate.  If you tab to and select Navigate, you will get a pull down menu that lets you select from one of the various tools available in the e3270ui installation. 

But, there are a couple short cuts.  First, you can enter N  and press enter to get the Navigate pull down.  Better yet, you can enter N.C, for example, to go to CICS, or N.Z to go to z/OS.  This way you skip having to go through the pull down menu.  Here's an example below: