Advantages of TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail

With TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail, you can monitor and manage distributed applications by providing distributed rules, alerts, and remediation actions.

Functional Advantage	Description
Scalability	• Network bandwidth and system resources are conserved by decentralizing and distributing the monitoring load. • Alerts are generated only when a certain event is detected. Under normal conditions, minimal network bandwidth is used.
Location Transparency and Fault Tolerance	• Autonomous agents monitor and perform management tasks independent of the TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail UI. • Fault tolerance is more efficient because even if an agent stops functioning, other agents continue to monitor local data and perform tasks.
Monitoring Logic and Advanced Monitoring Logic	• Flexible monitoring logic to enable a varied range of tasks, from simple rules (such as automatically restarting a failed process) to complex policies (such as complex rule switching for different monitoring setups) and also simplified access control to administrators. • Advanced monitoring provides additional support in terms of enhanced analytics, customizable dashboards, tag rulebases and more.
Flexibility	• A flexible environment to sustain a variety of configurations and dependencies, both internally and through components designed to communicate with external applications. • Extended capabilities include instrumenting applications with AMI protocol or by building gateways to non-instrumented applications, using APIs to build customized UIs and sophisticated, multilevel decision-making programs that draw data from multiple agents.

Scalability

A scalable network management tool minimizes network traffic so that the least amount of bandwidth is used. Also, to be truly scalable, the bandwidth consumed should not grow proportionately as the size of a network grows.

The TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail agents monitor conditions in the local environment and send alerts over the network only when problems are detected. This approach has major scalability advantages over a central, dedicated console server.

Unlike the distributed server architecture of TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail, with centralized server-based architectures, monitoring data is collected from remote nodes via network polling or point-to-point messaging to the console generated by agents on the devices. After gathering or receiving this information, the console server then makes centralized monitoring decisions. The network bandwidth consumed by polling-based systems grows proportionately with the number of monitored nodes, as does resource utilization on the console machine. Eventually, additional console servers must be employed to scale the system.

Using the distributed event-driven monitoring architecture employed by the TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail, network bandwidth and system resources are conserved by decentralizing and distributing the monitoring load. Another advantage of this method is that alerts are generated only when a problem exists, so under normal conditions minimal network bandwidth is used.

Location Transparency and Fault Tolerance

TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail agents are autonomous because they monitor and perform management tasks independent of the Hawk RedTail Console. Fault tolerance is built in because agents perform tasks independent of any other agents or user interface. If one or more agents on the network cease to function, other agents continue to monitor local data and perform tasks.

Monitoring Logic

TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail provides flexibility in performing monitoring tasks. The rules or policies you create can be simple or complex. For example, here are some solutions you can implement:

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Automatically restart a failed process.

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Create a series of escalations to respond to a continuing or deteriorating problem.

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Clear an alert when certain criteria are met.

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Selectively ignore an intermittent condition and respond only after it persists.

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Act when an alert clears, such as sending a stand-down notice to an on-call system administrator.

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Switch rules automatically to support different monitoring setups.

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Create thermostat-like controls to respond to fluctuating conditions.

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Automatically alter monitoring behavior based on user-defined schedules.

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Create user roles and assign different data access permissions making administration easier.

Advanced Monitoring Logic

You can enable additional monitoring capabilities in TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail with the TIBCO® Operational Intelligence Hawk® RedTail - Standard Edition license. By using these additional monitoring capabilities, you can implement solutions like the following:

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Store Hawk and external metrics as time series data.

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Create customized dashboards.

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Create, export, and import content packs, which include dashboards, rulebases, and metrics.

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Use a time series database to trace the behavior of an application over time.

Flexibility

TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail is designed to make your monitoring strategy seamless. TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail components are configured to maintain all configurations and dependencies internally. The TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail environment is flexible enough to support these variations, both internally and through components designed to communicate with external application environments.

Administrators can tailor the TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail environment by building custom rules and by automatically running commands and custom scripts. Programmers can extend TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail functionalities by:

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Instrumenting applications using the Hawk AMI API protocol, or by using Hawk AMI to build gateways between agents and non-instrumented applications.

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Using the Hawk Console API and the Hawk Console REST API (which provides a comprehensive interface for communicating with TIBCO OI Hawk RedTail agent). With these APIs, programmers can build customized UI applications or sophisticated, multi-level decision-making programs that can draw data from multiple agents.

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Using the Configuration Object API to build custom rulebases, and also build custom rulebase editors.

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Using the Hawk Console REST API to develop customized advanced features such as Dashboards and Search UI. For more information, see TIBCO® Operational Intelligence Hawk® RedTail User Guide.