Key Hawk Concepts

Hawk Agent

A Hawk Agent is an autonomous process on each host to monitor systems and applications on that computer. The Hawk agent operates autonomously and uses sets of rules, called "Rulebases". These rules help Hawk agents to configure system management, status reporting, and automation tasks.

Hawk Microagent

The term microagent is a generic term used to refer to the Hawk managed set of methods exposed by an application. This is done using either instrumenting the application using Hawk AMI API, or via a Hawk plug-in, or using an adapter. For more details on the microagent methods available with Hawk Container Edition, see TIBCO Hawk^® Container Edition Microagent Reference Guide.

Hawk Application Management Interface (AMI)

Hawk Application Management Interface (AMI) is a set of APIs that allows developer community to extend and enhance instrumentation of various infrastructure components in the network by plugging into the Hawk system and making their applications manageable via the Hawk Agent. For more information, refer to the TIBCO Hawk^® Programmers Guide.

Hawk Plug-In

Hawk plug-ins are Java components that reside and run inside the process space of a Hawk Agent. They are used to connect to a third party application using its specific protocols and expose them as microagents to Hawk, thereby enabling them to be managed by Hawk.

TCP Transport for Hawk

TCP Transport for Hawk is a TCP based transport for Hawk components using the Akka clustering designs. Also, the TCP Transport for Hawk removes the dependency on an external server or transport as the TCP communication happens peer to peer. For more information, refer to the TIBCO Hawk^® Installation, Configuration, and Administration Guide.

Rulebases and Rules

A rulebase is a configuration object that allows the Hawk agent to manage systems and applications on the network. A rulebase is a collection of one or more rules, whereas a rule is a user defined monitoring criteria. It specifies a data source in the form of a microagent method, one or more tests that check for conditions, and one or more actions to perform if the test condition evaluates to true. Rules can monitor parameters of an operating system, application or other managed object and perform tasks.

Monitoring Strategy

To create a monitoring strategy, you must identify the potential sources of problems and analyze how they can be prevented. Most monitoring tasks can be automated, but you must identify the unique situations that occur in your infrastructure. For more information on how to analyze the situations on your infrastructure that could be monitored and how to translate monitoring requirements into elements of Hawk rulebase, refer to the TIBCO Hawk^® Concepts Guide.

For more information about Hawk-related concepts, see TIBCO Hawk^® documentation.