1.6 WEBES and SEA Processes
Each WEBES-based service tool adds functionality to the Director, a process (or set of processes) that executes continuously. SEA provides the Director with the capability to capture and interpret hardware events. Event analysis can be performed automatically or at the request of an outside process.
SEA includes a web browser interface that enables you to interact with the Director. Although only one Director can run on a machine at any time, many web browser connections can be active simultaneously, all connected to the single Director.
WEBES (Web-Based Enterprise Services) and DESTA (Distributed Enterprise Service Tools Architecture) refer to the same common components.
1.6.1 Director
The Director manages its own host (either a machine, or a node in a cluster) and communicates to Directors on other hosts through TCP/IP sockets.
The Director captures, translates, and analyzes events as well as routing messages for the SEA system. The Director is idle except for the following circumstances:
- Events are received for processing
- Messages arrive from other WEBES processes on the same machine
- Messages arrive from a Director on another machine
- Another WEBES tool within the Director, performs any task
The Director is automatically started along with the machine and should not require any additional action.
See Sections 1.7 and 1.8 for more information regarding starting and stopping the Director.
1.6.2 Command Line Interface (CLI)
Many SEA operations can be performed from the command prompt by issuing commands beginning with desta and wsea. For example:
wsea analyze input myBinary.errlogEach CLI command starts a process. Some CLI processes connect to the Director on the same machine to perform tasks. However, other CLI processes perform all tasks themselves without connecting to a Director.
CLI commands typically support many options, enabling you to specify input and output files, and filtering criteria.
Chapters 2 and 3 of this guide describes how to use the command line interface.
1.6.3 Web Interface
Using a web browser, such as Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer, you can connect:
- directly to the URL of the Director on the same machine as the browser
- directly to the URL of the Director on a remote machine
- indirectly to a remote Director through a direct connection to the Director on the local or a remote machine.
The web interface can monitor multiple nodes by communicating with the Directors on other machines. You can establish a direct connection to the Director on any machine reachable by its TCP/IP socket port, and, through that connection, view the SEA processes on other nodes (via Director-to-Director communication). You do not need to have WEBES installed or running on the web browser's machine to connect directly to the Director on a remote machine.
Chapter 4 of this guide describes how to use the web interface and Appendix C discusses the browser requirements.
1.6.4 Director/Interface Interaction
Figure 1–1 shows an example of two machines running SEA processes.
Figure 1–1 Interaction Between Two Systems Running SEA
In this example, a UNIX machine and a Windows machine, each running a single Director, communicate with each other over a network.
Web interface #1 is a web browser running on the UNIX machine, directly connected to the local Director on the same machine (http://localhost:7902). It can also communicate with the Director on the Windows machine through the UNIX Director. This enables you to view the output produced by either machine (such as analysis results) using the same web interface.
Web interface #2 is also a web browser running on the UNIX machine, but it has directly connected to the Director on the Windows machine (http://thatPC.mydomain.com:7902). Using this web interface you can, if desired, connect back to the UNIX Director as well, but the UNIX Director need not be running at all.
A telnet session initiated from the Windows machine has logged on to the UNIX machine, and the user has issued the SEA CLI command wsea report (to view the results of automatic analysis). The CLI process connects to the UNIX machine's Director, which returns the current report data to the CLI process. The report text is then displayed to the user. Note that it is not necessary to have the Director running on the Windows machine for this type of remote connection.
The CLI command wsea analyze input thisBinary.errlog (which performs manual analysis on the binary log file named thisBinary.errlog) is issued from a command prompt on the Windows machine. In the example, the file thisBinary.errlog is assumed to be a log file from a UNIX machine that was transferred to the Windows machine using FTP. The Director is not required to perform manual analysis and therefore, the local Director is not required.
Finally, web interface #3 is a web browser running on the Windows machine. This interface is directly connected to the local Director on the same machine (http://localhost:7902), the same way that web interface #1 connects to its local UNIX Director.