The IBM Tivoli Universal Agent is a generic agent of IBM Tivoli Monitoring. You can configure it to monitor any data you collect. You can view the data in real-time and historical workspaces on the Tivoli Enterprise Portal and use Tivoli Enterprise Portal monitoring situations and automation policies to manage it, just like data from other Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Agents.
The IBM Tivoli Universal Agent extends the performance and availability monitoring capabilities of IBM Tivoli Monitoring. It gives you a single point of monitoring for all your enterprise resources and protects your investment in applications and resources.
The IBM Tivoli Universal Agent enables you to:
Integrate data from virtually any operating system and any source. For example, custom applications, databases, systems, subsystems, networks, and POS controllers.
Monitor specific data attributes that interest you.
Respond quickly to changing monitoring and management scenarios.
Control attributes and the surfacing of data.
Data providers are the interfaces of the IBM Tivoli Universal Agent. They enable you to supply data in whatever way is most convenient or practical for your particular monitoring scenario. The IBM Tivoli Universal Agent supports the following data providers:
API Server Data Provider supports API client functions. The data provider and the IBM Tivoli Universal Agent APIs enable you to easily develop scripts and C/C++ programs that send data to the IBM Tivoli Universal Agent. They also support a command-line interface which implements a subset of the API functions.
File Data Provider monitors data residing in a sequential text file. It offers the simplest, most direct way of using the IBM Tivoli Universal Agent to monitor data with IBM Tivoli Monitoring.
HTTP Data Provider allows you to monitor the availability and response time of selected URLs. The HTTP Data Provider runs as a separate data provider. You can specify URLs to monitor in the startup configuration file, within situations, or through the Take Action option.
ODBC Data Provider allows you to collect data from ODBC-compliant databases using SQL Select statements and stored procedures supported by the particular ODBC source that is being monitored.
Post Data Provider offers a convenient means of sending ad hoc notifications such as messages, alerts, and status information to IBM Tivoli Monitoring. You can customize the Post Data Provider to fill a specific use.
Script Data Provider facilitates the collection of monitoring data by running a script or program at regular intervals and parsing the script output to look for errors, anomalies and threshold conditions.
SNMP Data Provider brings the functionality of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) management capability to IBM Tivoli Monitoring, allowing you to integrate network management with systems and applications management. This functionality includes network discovery, trap monitoring, SNMP queries, and SET operations.
Socket Data Provider enables the IBM Tivoli Universal Agent to manage data on operating systems where it cannot be installed by implementing program-to-program communication using the socket transport paradigm.