Centeractive Mirador

TIBCO® is leading the world in messaging, real time event processing and process automation and TIBCO Hawk™, a sophisticated tool for monitoring and managing distributed applications and systems throughout the enterprise, is an important element in this which helps operations and support staff monitor and control system components.

Mirador is an easy-to-use toolbox for working with Hawk™, which gives instant visibility deep into your system due to its powerful and flexible dashboard. It is easy to configure/setup and presents the data from the Hawk™ microagents in an easily manageable and understandable form. Mirador is the “icing on the cake” when working with Tibco Hawk™.

Features

Easy Configuration:
The basic behavior of Mirador can be customized through the application properties dialog. Here you can easily define: Hawk™ environments you want to monitor, date and time patterns to be shown in the display, settings used to structure microagents etc

Alerting:
• The alert table panel shows alerts and notifications that are generated by the rules from the different decentralized Hawk™ agents. A panel with such a table appears in the detail view of each individual agent node, it contains alerts and notifications that were issued by this particular agent. The detail view of the top level Hawk™ environment node also contains an alert table panel that shows alerts and notifications from all Hawk™ agents present in the monitored environment. According to your needs, you can easily switch between these different views in order to obtain a general overview of pending or cleared alerts or to perform an in-depth analysis of an affected computer.
• The alert table shows which alerts have been cleared by the issuing agent and which alerts have been read by the user. Alerts are automatically removed from the table as soon as they are no longer relevant, the corresponding conditions can be defined by the user. Single alerts can easily be suspended during the desired period of time.
• The entire content of alert tables can be exported into an Excel file for further analysis or for later statistical purposes.

Data Collection Visualization:
• Methods from remote Hawk™ micoragents are accessible through the Mirador interface as if they were located on your local computer. Some methods expect arguments (parameters) provided by the user and most methods return data upon invocation. Methods are named synchronous if they can be invoked directly through the Mirador program. The result of asynchronous methods on the other hand is presented by the Hawk™ environment each time a certain event occurs. Mirador offers an easy way to interact with synchronous and asynchronous methods, either by direct invocation or through subscriptions.
• The result from microagent methods by default is shown in a form or a table. Together with the table, there is a detail view that renders the selected row in an alternative and easy to read form.
• The default look of the result view can be changed and customized within the result control box that appears right on the “Invocation” and the “Subscription” panel.
• The results from subsequent method invocations can be shown in a historically growing table.
• You can also choose between different chart types and customize them in order to produce the result view that best meets your needs.

Monitering TIBCO BusinessWorks:
• Mirador offers powerful BusinessWorks™ (BW) process engines that monitor capability. The "BusinessWorks™ Engines" folder node groups all detected BW process engines. Its detail view contains a summary with useful resource data from all BW process engines. Their status, CPU and memory usage for example, is visible on the fly.
• Every deployed BusinessWorks™ process engine is shown with a series of predefined panels that present data, each of a certain type. You'll find information about the engine status, process starters, process definitions, exceptions, locks etc.
• The process definitions are shown in a hierarchically structured way that lets you see how they interact. Each process definition also has a number of panels that present information about the activity hierarchy and its status. The process monitor shows process execution in real-time. It reports the steps performed in serial or parallel, the execution time per activity and the overall time consumption.

Reporting:
• Mirador is not only useful for interacting with the different agents from a Hawk™ environment in a dynamic way, but it also offers comprehensive functionality to extract information about the different Hawk™components. The description of each microagent and its methods are clearly laid out. Method arguments and expected return data are described in an attractive and structured way.
• The content display of Hawk™ rulebases is intelligible and gives a quick overview of how they operate and what kind of alerts you have to expect from the different Hawk™ agents.
• Mirador contains a Reports Engine that generates descriptions of desired parts of your Hawk™ environment in different formats (HTML). You are free to choose one or several agents from the monitored environment and can decide yourself, what component types are to be included in the report.

Smart features - real benefit:
• Mirador is a program that was designed in close collaboration between the users and our software designers. Most features have their origin in a request reported by our IT specialists or our customers. The features are selected only if they add real benefit to the software but once they are part of the program, we constantly try to improve them.

Agent Collection Microagent:
• With agent collection microagents you can invoke identical microagent methods on a series of remote Hawk™ agents and present the return data in a compact form depending on your needs. You interact with the agent collection microagent methods just as you would with any other microagent method. That way you can create subscriptions that act all over your network and present result data in the form of tables and charts. A typical use case would be to display the resource usage (CPU time and/or memory consumption) of a number of servers within a single time chart.
• The agent collection microagent is a Mirador software component that gets defined (added) by the user through a simple mouse click within the detail view of a mircroagent method node.

Mirador Agent:
• Mirador acts as a pseudo Hawk™ agent in a way that it can load user defined Hawk™ microagents from a plug-in directory. At program start-up, Mirador automatically scans the plugin folder located in its installation directory and tries to load the microagents defined by the .hma files. Successfully loaded microagents appear in the navigation tree and are presented in the same way as those belonging to ordinary Hawk™ agents. The interaction with microagents managed by the Mirador Agent works exactly the same as the interaction with microagents managed by any Hawk™ agent.
• The Mirador Agent is highly profitable during development and testing of custom microagents. It provides a straightforward way of checking the correct behavior of these software components. Unlike Hawk™ agents however, the Mirador Agent does not contain rulebases and it does not provide an interface to applications using the Hawk™ Application Management Interface (AMI).

Microagent Grouping:
• Mirador automatically groups (structures) Hawk™ microagents depending on their display name. The program, by default, checks for colons and commas in the microagent display name and uses them as separators to build up a group node hierarchy. Therefore certain microagents are not placed in the “Microagents” group but in a specific node or branch. If the generated group names are of the “=” format, only the value part is shown by default. This is especially useful if the microagents have names inherited from JMX MBeans. Obviously the default behavior can be changed by the user.
• The microagent with the display name “Sample:env=test,release=3.2.6,name=Cleaner” for example would be represented as follows if the default settings are used.

Subscriptions:
• Subscriptions defined on microagent methods can be saved to external files and reloaded to any agent at any future date - also in a different session – as long as such agents have the same microagent loaded. You can switch between individual active subscriptions by simply selecting them from the main menu where they get added dynamically as soon as they are started or loaded respectively.
• Mirador subscriptions survive temporary loss of the agent for which they are defined. If Hawk™considers an agent as expired because its heartbeat can no longer be detected, Mirador caches existing subscriptions on that agent. As soon as the agent is alive again, Mirador automatically re-establishes all its subscriptions. The program even assembles the results from previously interrupted and from the newly established subscription in case it was defined to cover a time period.