TIBCO Administration Domain

The TIBCO administration domain combines the benefits of a distributed run-time environment with centralized design time deployment, and run-time monitoring and management. This section discusses the TIBCO administration domain, the associated security implementation, and how you monitor and manage the domain.

TIBCO Administration Domain Overview

A TIBCO administration domain is a collection of users, machines, and ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks components that a TIBCO Administration Server monitors and manages. There is only one TIBCO Administration Server for each TIBCO administration domain. Components within an administration domain can communicate with systems outside the domain, but the TIBCO administration domain is the administrative boundary of an enterprise integration project.

Note that when the TIBCO Administration Server goes down, all process engines and adapters continue to run.

Components of a TIBCO administration domain illustrates the TIBCO administration domain and its contents.

Figure 10: Components of a TIBCO administration domain

A TIBCO administration domain consists of these elements, numbered correspondingly in Components of a TIBCO administration domain:

Procedure 

  1. TIBCO Administration Server—Each TIBCO administration domain has one and only one TIBCO Administration Server.

  2. Components—Component software includes the ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks engine and adapters.

  3. Machines—Each TIBCO administration domain contains one or more machines. A machine can be added to an administration domain when a ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks component or adapter is installed. By default, all machines within TIBCO administration domain are expected to be in the same network subnet. You can, however, set up your system to use TIBCO Rendezvous rvrd and can then use ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks across subnets.

  4. User and Access Information—User and authorization information is specified with the TIBCO Administrator GUI and stored in the domain data store. For more information, see Security.

  5. Projects—A project is created with the TIBCO Designer GUI. You create an Enterprise Archive file (EAR file) for the project with TIBCO Designer, then send that file to the machine where TIBCO administration server resides. You can then deploy the project with TIBCO Administrator. Once deployed, the project becomes visible in the TIBCO Administrator GUI and its components can be started, stopped, and monitored from there. For more information, see Projects.

Security

The TIBCO Administration Server supports centralized authentication and authorization. Using the TIBCO Administrator GUI, users with full administrative privileges can define which users should have access to which part of the system.

Authentication—The verification of the identity of a person or process.
Authorization—Permission to view or execute. TIBCO Administrator gives users access rights to the functionality of the product they need. For example, access rights are given to view or to write to projects at design time from TIBCO Designer or to view or to manage modules from the TIBCO Administrator console. The TIBCO Administration Server controls that access.

ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks supports authentication and authorization for both data stores and components (process engines or adapters) in the TIBCO administration domain. For example, only authorized users may start or stop process engines or adapters. This fine-grained user authorization scheme allows you to customize the system to your company’s needs.

Monitoring and Managing the Domain

The TIBCO AdministratorGUI allows you to monitor and manage the different elements of the TIBCO administration domain if you are authorized to do so.

View, add, and delete users and assign access privileges to each user. Monitor and manage the machines in the TIBCO administration domain. Monitor deployments. This includes viewing component status and throughput and looking at traces, which can also be exported to a file. Manage deployments. This includes stopping and starting process engines and adapters.