Competence centers

If you operate in a large enterprise with multiple management servers distributed over a wide area, specialist knowledge relating to a specific subject is not always available locally. For example, your organization might have a center responsible for all operating system-related problems. In addition, another center of expertise may be responsible for a database, which is used company-wide.

A competence center hierarchy distributes responsibility for managed nodes. Regional management servers are not solely responsible for managed nodes. Instead, messages about specific subjects go to a competence center management server, where expertise exists to solve similar problems for all managed nodes.

You can configure competence centers using agent-based or server-based flexible management, or both.

Competence centers with agent-based flexible management

Agent-based flexible management enables you to configure managed nodes to communicate directly with servers other than the primary management server. You can configure your managed nodes to communicate with the management servers of your choice anywhere in your network.

In the figure below all managed nodes send all database messages to the database competence center management server.

Agent-based flexible management in a competence center environment

The advantage of configuring competence centers with agent-based flexible management is that you can also include follow-the-sun capabilities by adding time conditions to the relevant competence center conditions.

Competence centers with server-based flexible management

Server-based flexible management enables you to configure regional management servers to forward some messages to other servers in your network. You can configure your regional management servers to forward messages to the management servers of your choice anywhere in your network, based on message attributes such as originating node or application.

In the figure below all regional management servers forward all database messages to the database competence center management server.

Server-based flexible management in a competence center environment

Message operations (for example acknowledge, own, severity change) are synchronized between regional management servers, competence center management servers, and the central management server. This way the message states are always kept synchronized across the whole enterprise environment.

The advantages of configuring competence centers with server-based flexible management are:

You do not need to configure the nodes, because the target for the messages is decided on the regional management servers.
The messages forwarded to competence center management servers are also visible on (and synchronized with) the regional management servers, so you have the full context of messages on the regional management servers.

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