EMF Terminology

The following terms relate to Environment Management:

Term Definition

Manageable component

A component that can be individually managed from the Environment Management hub. A manageable component for PeopleSoft is typically a file server, an application server, a web server, individual hosts, or a PeopleSoft Process Scheduler server.

Peer

A manageable component that is involved in a transaction with one or more peers in the Environment Management by using the hub as the intermediary. A peer may also be responsible for delegation of management responsibility to a collection of manageable components. Examples of peers are agents, Change Assistant, and the Environment Management viewer.

Heartbeat

“I am alive messages” sent by every peer to the hub. The default interval is configurable. On every heartbeat, the peer pings the server to see if it has any pending messages. If it does, the messages are taken and carried out.

Environment

All of the manageable components in the enterprise that share the same globally unique identifier (GUID) in the database. There can be more than one instances of a type of managed component in an environment. For example, development environments can contain several application servers, Process Schedulers, and web servers.

GUID

Uniquely identifies a particular PeopleSoft system. PeopleSoft assigns a unique value, referred to as a GUID, to each PeopleSoft application installation. This value can't be customized. When an Environment Management agent notifies the hub that it has found a manageable component belonging to an environment, if the GUID of the environment is not recognized, the hub creates a new environment representation.

Crawling

The process of scanning the hard disk for known PeopleSoft patterns for manageable components. The hub has a set of configurable parameters by which the recrawl intervals can be altered. Based on this, the hub can issue a recrawl command to the agents to discover information about newly installed or changed configurations.

Note: During crawling, the Environment Management Framework uses the psserver property in the peopletools.properties file within each PS_HOME installation to determine the type of server(s) installed. For example, APP is application server, BATCH is Process Scheduler, DB is database server, WEB is web server, and FILE is file server.

Note: Recrawling includes revalidating.

Revalidate

The process of checking whether the last set of managed components that have been discovered is still valid. The agent iterates through the list of components that have been discovered from the last recrawl. It then checks whether the current set of configuration parameters for the managed components have changed the management scope for the component. If so, the information is updated. If the new set of configuration options has made the component not usable, it is removed from the list of managed components. This information is updated in the hub the next time the agent communicates with the hub.