What is TIBCO Hawk and How does it works?
What is Hawk?
TIBCO Hawk is an event-based monitoring system which delivers real-time visibility and control of distributed enterprise applications & Utilizes rules to assure system availability and performance. The software is designed specifically for monitoring distributed systems. The rules or policies you create can be very simple or complex and we can implement solutions like restarting a failed job or clearing the alert condition when a certain condition satisfies. TIBCO Hawk consists of below components. In this post, I will explain about some main components.
TIBCO Hawk Agent
A TIBCO Hawk Agent is an autonomous process that should be installed on each computer to monitor systems and applications on that computer. The Hawk Agents operate autonomously and use sets of rules, called Rulebases. These rules help Hawk agents to configure system management, status reporting, and automation tasks.
TIBCO Hawk WebConsole/Desktop Version
The TIBCO Hawk Console is an application that provides a central view of all the distributed components interacting within Hawk System. The communication between the distributed components happens through RV or EMS depends on your configuration. We need to install and manage both RV & EMS separately.
TIBCO Hawk Plug-in
TIBCO Hawk plug-ins are Java programs that reside and run inside the process space of a Hawk Agent. These plugins are used to connect to third-party applications using their specific protocols and expose them as MicroAgents to Hawk. For e.g. we can create a Java program which pings a database and returns its status. By adding this we will be able to monitor the DB and can configure automatic action item based on the response. We will discuss this in another post.
Read How to monitor or query a database using hawk? & How to configure TIBCO EMS Microagent to monitor it using Hawk?
How does it work?
TIBCO Hawk agents perform the work required to monitor applications and systems based on the RuleBases which we added. An agent can have a rulebase, RuleBase map, or schedules object. Rulebases are created based on the micro-agents (Java Components) and schedules are using to specify a time frame when we need to monitor a particular application or process. An agent runs on each server and monitors local conditions. Each agent uses collections of locally loaded rules organized into RuleBase to apply monitoring logic. A RuleBase tells an agent how to monitor particular application or system resources and what actions to take when specific conditions are detected. TIBCO Hawk includes pre-built RuleBase that monitor basic system-level parameters. Rulebases can be selectively loaded to an agent or group of agents on a temporary or permanent basis. The TIBCO Hawk console application shows alert messages generated by RuleBase and presents them in an organized view. Alerts are colour-coded to indicate the severity of a reported problem. Clicking on an alert message displays the error message along with a recent history of problems on the node. TIBCO Hawk web console does not store centralized monitoring intelligence; it simply offers a view of events on your distributed systems.
Hope you got a fair idea about what is hawk and how its working. Please let me know your feedback and doubts in the comments below.