The Fault and Alarm component Web service can be deployed to capture faults and alarms that occur for each deployed Web service implementation, for the Admission Control component Web service, and for the Usage Record component Web service. It can write fault and alarm information to the common event infrastructure (CEI) repository.
If you plan to use the CEI repository to capture fault and alarm data, you must enable the CEI service and configure a data source for it.
The CEI service uses the database included with WebSphere® Application Server, but it can be configured to use DB2®, Oracle, or another database supported by WebSphere Application Server.
When encountering error conditions, service implementations will need to emit fault information. For severe error conditions, they will need to emit alarms. Both faults and alarms are emitted as common base events using JMX management notifications, and optionally using CEI as well. The common base event is an extensible XML schema for describing event information.
The Fault and Alarm component Web service provides extensions to the common base event format to describe implementation faults. CEI is used as the infrastructure for notifying interested parties of events and provides a persistent event repository that supports flexible event queries based on XPath. JMX notifications are useful for enabling third parties to access WebSphere Application Server and handle notifications, for example by generating SNMP alerts. However, because JMX notifications do not include a listener for CEI, the Fault and Alarm component Web service produces common base events in addition to JMX notifications.
Although CEI can be used to emit any kind of business event, CEI is limited in this implementation to generating fault and alarm events. This is done so that you do not need to set aside a large number of application server instances to process CEI events. The CEI client API comes embedded with the base WebSphere Application Server product and can be activated at no charge.
To configure the settings for faults and alarms, launch the TWSS Administration Console and click .
The Traffic Shaping component Web service is closely related to this service. Refer to the topic Administering the Traffic Shaping component Web service for more information.