NetView Operations Facility › OPNFALRT REXX Function—Generate Alerts › Hierarchy Parameter

Hierarchy Parameter

Use the hierarchy parameter to specify all the system resources relating to the problem. This enables NPDA to draw a picture of these resources, and also enables you to filter alerts based on the resources. Specify the hierarchy parameter as a character string containing 0 to 60 bytes, which can contain up to five 12-byte entries. Each 12-byte entry consists of:

• An eight-byte resource name. This is arbitrary, and can be something like IMSPROD.
• A four-byte resource type. This is also arbitrary, but can be something like IMS or INIT.

Suppose that you want to generate an alert because of an IMS failure. You might specify the hierarchy parameter as follows:

IMSPROD IMS

Note the spacing of the blanks in this string. In any given 12-byte hierarchy item, the first eight bytes are the resource name and the next four bytes are the resource type. This structure is then copied up to five times to make the complete hierarchy parameter.

Now suppose that the IMS failure in the previous example resulted from an I/O error. You can specify the hierarchy parameter as follows:

IMSPROD IMSDASD721 DASD

The above parameter specifies that the IMS outage resulted from a problem with the resource name DASD721 of type DASD.

The hierarchy parameter is optional. If you omit it, the OPNFALRT function specifies it for you, but you must include a comma if you want to specify the alert text parameter.