Problem Determination Using Self-Managing Autonomic Technology

68 Problem Determination Using Self-Managing Autonomic Technology

3.6 Generating Common Base Events

The Autonomic Computing Toolkit provides two ways to generate Common Base

Events. The first is using the Common Base Event APIs provided in the

org.eclipse.hyades.logging.event.cbe package. This Java package is located in

the hlcbe101.jar file and is available from the Eclipse Web site at:

http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/index.html

It is also shipped with the Autonomic Computing Toolkit as part of the Generic

Log Adapter component.

The second way is by using the Generic Log Adapter that is suitable for existing

applications that already generate text-based log files.

Generating Common Base Events using APIs

In some cases, we want to generate Common Base Events directly. For example,

if we are writing our new application to provide the application’s tracing as

Common Base Events, we might also want an application to generate Common

Base Events and send them directly to a resource manager or log them into a

file. To accomplish this, there are APIs provided to generate and configure a

Common Base Event object that we can use for each event we need to report

(see Figure 3-2).

Figure 3-2 Generating Common Base Events directly from the application

The Common Base Event API provides the CommonBaseEvent class that

implements the interface called ICommonBaseEvent. The interface

ICommonBaseEvent is part of the package org.eclipse.hyades.logging.core. This

package is provided by the Eclipse project at:

http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/index.html

It is also provided by the Autonomic Computing Toolkit in the Generic Log

Adapter component and can be found in the <GLA_inst_dir>\lib\hlcore.jar file,

where <GLA_inst_dir> is the Generic Log Adapter component installation

directory.

Common

Base Event

Application

Common

Base

Event API

Message

Chapter 3. Common Base Events 69

The process for generating Common Base Events can be summarized by the

following actions:

1. Create an event factory.

2. Create an empty Common Base Event.

3. Define the source component.

4. Define the reporter component.

5. Define the situation data.

6. Obtain the creation time.

7. Define additional information for the event as needed.

See 3.7, “Generating Common Base Events using APIs” on page 70 for more

details about each of these steps.

Generating Common Base Events using GLA

Currently, most enterprise applications provide log files for tracing the application

behavior. The Generic Log Adapter (GLA) provides a way to convert existing log

files into the Common Base Event format (see Figure 3-3). The GLA engine

takes an adapter file and the log file as inputs and converts the entries in the log

file to Common Base Events. The adapter configuration file describes the

conversion rules from the log file to the Common Base Event fields. The

Autonomic Computing Toolkit provides a plug-in to Eclipse for writing and editing

adapter configuration files that specifically generate the output in a Common

Base Event format and testing the adapter configuration file before deploying it.

Figure 3-3 Using the Generic Log Adapter to generate Common Base Events

Chapter 4, “Generic Log Adapter” on page 77 describes how to generate

Common Base Events using the Generic Log Adapter in more detail.

out.log

GLAAdaptor.adapter

GLA Engine

Common

Base Event

Application