Introduction to Tibco Hawk for Beginners? Tutorial

Tibco Hawk
This is another short  TIBCO tutorial from my TIBCO tutorial series. in this i am gonna discuss what is TIBCO hawk , Where do we use TIBCO hawk , What are components of TIBCO hawk , what benefit TIBCO hawk offers and how Tibco hawk works.  if you are interested to know more about TIBCO  Rendezvous , TIBCO EMS and there fundamental concept  or if you are looking for some TIBCO Interview questions you may find this link interesting TIBCO Tutorial


Let's start with TIBCO hawk now.
TIBCO Hawk is a monitoring tool which is used to manage distributed applications running across multiple servers or multiple geographic. you can use TIBCO hawk for reading log files and can have rules based upon certain keyword e.g. ERROR or Exception and when such word comes in log file it will alert the TIBCO hawk GUI also called TIBCO  HAWK Display. hawk can also monitor whether a process is up or down etc.

TIBCO Hawk is based upon TIBCO RV and uses TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV capability for all its messaging requirements.

TIBCO hawk consists following functional components:

Hawk Agent: This is the most important part of whole TIBCO Hawk suite and has to be deployed  in all host you would like to monitor.
So a Hawk agent is a TIBCO Hawk process which performs all the monitoring and management tasks on the host as defined in the rulebase.
for example TIBCO Hawk Agent can look for certain words e.g. ERROR or Exception and when such word comes in log file it will alert  the TIBCO hawk GUI.

Hawk Micro Agents:
Hawk Micro Agents are objects that acts as data source , it supports various methods invoked by the hawk agents and console applications.

Hawk Rulebase and Rules:
In General a TIBCO Hawk Rule is a user defined rule for monitoring application which involves one or more data sources (micro agents) and check for specific conditions and takes one or more actions based upon those conditions. a hawk rulebase is simply collection of one or more hawk rules.

Hawk Monitor (Dispaly):
TIBCO hawk monitor is a console application which shows a graphical view of all managed hosts and objects and enables interacting with them. Its like a GUI screen where you can see the status of different managed host, it uses color coding to highlight status e.g. if a process is up and there is no error then it shows that in green color while if a process is down or there are any errors it shows color
Other than green e.g. RED. The console API allows development of customized hawk display application based upon needs o monitoring team.

Hawk AMI:

TIBCO Hawk AMI is an API provided for instrumenting a Hawk managed application. TIBCO hawk AMI available in C, C++ and Java implements a TIBCO RV based protocol with two way dynamic discovery for the TIBCO hawk monitoring. you can also used with no TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV application as well.

Hawk Event Service:
TIBCO Hawk Event Service is a console API based application that records the activity reported by the hawk agents in logs. You can also configured hawk event service to take rule based action in response to different hawk events.

Benefits of using TIBCO hawk for monitoring applications:

Scalable Deployment: TIBCO hawk uses distributed event-driven monitoring architecture which enables conservation of network bandwidth and system resources sharing the monitoring load with different hosts. TIBCO hawk alerts are generated only when a error or exception occurs, so in normal case minimal network bandwidth would be utilized.

Location Transparency:
TIBCO Hawk Agent and TIBCO hawk display communicate using TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV messages. Since TIBCO RV uses subject based addressing, so physical location of each component is not important what matters is all component subscribe on relevant subjects.Also multiple instances of  TIBCO hawk display can run from any location on the network without changing any configuration incurring additional network overhead.


Flexible Rule-based monitoring:
Rule-based monitoring allows TIBCO hawk to configure advanced and sophisticated rules based on different behaviors of different applications.TIBCO hawk not only generates alerts and actions but also provides advanced features to implement solutions such as automatic restarting of application processes, creating escalating actions in response to a deteriorating problem taking an action when an alert clears, and automatically alerting monitoring behavior based on user-defined schedules.


Ease of Configuration and Management:
Administrators can configure all the nodes in a TIBCO hawk domain through a central repository by creating and deploying monitoring rules within the repository. Also, administrators can create customized views of the TIBCO hawk console display for monitoring specific events/nodes.

Several Hawk displays can be brought up anywhere on the network without impacting each other.


to read more about TIBCO RV, TIBCO EMS please see my earlier post in this TIBCO Tutorial series :
TIBCO Certified Messaging
RVD (Rendezvous daemon) vs RVRD (Rendezvous Routing Daemon)
Http Interface of TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV
Tibrv Errors and Exceptions
Difference between TIBCO EMS and TIBCO Rendezvous (RV)
Upcoming TIBCO tutorials
TIBCO RV tips and commands
Fundamentals of TIBCO RV messaging.
TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV messaging