300+ [UPDATED] Tibco Hawk Interview Questions

1. What Is Tibco Hawk?

TIBCO Hawk is network monitoring and management software for distributed systems and applications in the enterprise. It is designed using the concept of an independent smart agent that runs on each node in the network to monitor local conditions, so there is no need for a centralized monitoring console or frequent pooling across the network that can consume more bandwidth or cause network traffic.

One of the advantages of using TIBCO Hawk is that it uses less bandwidth while monitoring every machine in the network. It is because TIBCO Hawk distributes the monitoring load to each machine that has locally installed Hawk agents in order to conserve system resources and network bandwidth. The system administrator has now the capability to monitor the operating system, the application parameters and behaviors of each machine in the network using only less bandwidth. Another great advantage of TIBCO Hawk is that, in case of network failure, the Hawk agents will continue to perform local tasks because each agent operates independently from the other.

One of the benefits of using TIBCO Hawk is that it reduces sudden or unexpected system outages and slowdowns. TIBCO Hawk has this capability to automatically repair failures and slowdowns within seconds of detection and it also allows problems to be found and fixed before any slowdowns and failures can occur.

2. Tibco Hawk System Architecture?

There are two major components that make up the TIBCO Hawk System: the Agents and the Console Applications. Agents reside on each computer in the network and perform monitoring and managing duties. It uses rule bases as a monitoring policy and micro agents to extract monitoring information and to carry-out specified tasks.

The Console Applications, on the other hand, can be further divided into three subcomponents: the TIBCO Hawk Display that provides the interface to monitor and manage agent behavior in your network, the Event Service that records and logs all the activities of the agent, and the bridges to other management systems.

3. Features Of Tibco Hawk Display?

The TIBCO Hawk Display is a local window for all the activities in the network, which provides a graphical user interface used for viewing active agents in the network. It displays container icons that are created for each agent and arranged in clusters. These agent icons are, by default, clustered according to subnets. It also allows you to customize container icons and to convey added information that can be useful for your monitoring. Menus and dialogs are provided for you to create, modify and distribute rule bases to any agent present in the network. You can also invoke a micro agent method that allows you to view the results immediately.

4. Features Of Tibco Hawk Event Service?

The TIBCO Hawk Event Service does not only record the activity of TIBCO Hawk agents but it also logs and subscribes to all TIBCO Hawk system events such as agent activation and expiration, micro agent and rule base changes, alerts and clears. The external applications must be saved on a data file in order for them to access the logs. If ever there is an expired or non-communicating agent in the network, the Event Service provides the use of a user-supplied script to notify the system administrator.

5. How Tibco Hawk Agent Does Operate?

The Hawk agent uses micro agents as an object to represent and interact with the managed object in your local machine. Then, the agent loads the rule bases as monitoring policies to monitor your system or your applications. It uses RV Messaging to communicate with the micro agents, and uses EMS or RV messaging to communicate with other agents, Event Service and Hawk Display. It also communicates using instances of TIBCO Hawk Display but it works independently with the Display and other agents.

6. What Is The Difference Between The Hawk Micro Agent (hma) And Application Micro Agents?

HMA or Hawk Micro agents are default micro agents residing on your local machine to monitor system’s health and statistics. HMA can be a platform-specific or platform-independent micro agent. It means that every platform has its own specific micro agent or it has micro agents that are default to any platform.

The Application Micro agents, on the other hand, are micro agents that are specifically created or coded to monitor the application statistics. Only those applications that use AMI are dynamically discovered by the Hawk System and represented by micro agents that enable those applications to be managed and monitored.

7. What Is Ami Or Application Management Interface?

Application Management Interface (AMI) is a gateway between the external applications and Hawk System that uses RV Messaging to communicate. It is used as a protocol in incrementing an application with a management interface that allows the application to be monitored and controlled by exposing internal application methods to the TIBCO Hawk system.

8. Tibco Hawk Agents Operate By Loading Rule Bases. So, What Are Rule Bases?

Rule base refers to a collection of rules that controls the monitoring conducted by the agents, which can be created or modified using the rule base editor in the TIBCO HAWK Display. It uses a micro agent method as a data source to create one or more tests. These tests use If/else construct to check the conditions and includes action if the condition evaluates to true. An action, can be sending an alert or notification messages, execute an OS command, creating post condition, or invoking another micro gent method.

9. What Are Alert Messages?

Alert messages originate from a rule base that implements the monitoring policy or logic. When a specified condition occurs, the agent publishes an alert message to the TIBCO Hawk Display and presents it by colors to show the severity of the alert. It uses colors such as red for high alert, orange for medium alert, yellow for low alert, cyan if it’s recovering, green if it’s ok and purple for no heartbeat. These colors are default to the Hawk Display but it also allows you to change them based on your own preference. You can also suspend an alert message that will be temporarily neutralized to prevent it from interfering with other monitoring tasks. If ever a condition ceases, these alerts will be cleared or removed in the Display.

10. What Is A Rule Base Scheduling?

Rule base scheduling allows you to create a schedule that defines when a rule base, rule, test or action is active or not. These schedules can be imposed on the rule base to control the monitoring activity and performing corrective tasks. You can define and assign a schedule using the TIBCO Hawk Display, which must be saved on a file so that it can be assigned later on to one or more agents and can be applied to any rule base objects.

In creating a schedule, you can also specify inclusion and exclusion periods. For example, you can set a rule base to be activated only during office hours and be deactivated during holidays. For the inclusion period, you can use Mondays to Fridays from 8 AM to 5PM and for the exclusion period you can include holidays such as Christmas and New Year.

11. What Are The Hawk Group Operations?

• There are three Hawk Group operations:
  the Network Query, Network Query with test and Network Action. These group operations allow you to detect and solve problems in the network. If you want to research and test on how to build rules, these Hawk Group operations can be used as an interactive tool.
• Network Query, from the name itself, queries one or more agents in the network to detect the location where such specified condition exists. It is such a powerful feature that allows you to communicate with multiple TIBCO Hawk agents at one time. As an individual agent, you can ask or query multiple agents in your network.
• The Network Query with test, on the other hand, is where you apply a test based on the results of the network query. You can use these tests to filter the result set, but these tests are optional and only one test per query is allowed.
• Lastly, the Network Action specifies an action to be performed on any agent in the network but you can only specify an action one at a time.
• Both the Network query and Network Action allow you to combine common and identical tasks which can be executed in a single operation and can be performed on each agent in the network.

12. What Are The Monitoring Best Practices?

Using TIBCO Hawk, you can have these practices to achieve an efficient and effective way of monitoring your system and your applications.

• Create a rule base based on the process existence. This is to check or test whether there are not enough or too many process instances that are running or you can use this rule base to automatically restart a failed process.
• Creating a rule base that monitors the process resource utilization. This is to make sure that the use of the resources such as the memory and the CPU don’t get too big overtime, which might affect the system’s performance. Create a rule base for your Logfiles or Event Log Monitoring. Through this, you can make or define another rule based on the entries of those activities logged on which you’ll be able to perform necessary actions.
• Checking for the existence of an Application Micro agent also needs to be monitored. This is useful in a situation where you want to detect if the application that you are monitoring is not responding or not communicating with the agents.

After studying and configuring TIBCO Hawk System, you will see that it is such a powerful monitoring tool. It can help system administrator to guarantee and improve software performance and availability. With the solutions provided by TIBCO Hawk, monitoring can now be implemented in the network without worrying much of the use of the bandwidth and the network traffic.

13. What Are Tibco Hawk Agent And What Role It Plays In Hawk Monitoring?

HAWK agent is a key part of TIBCO HAWK Product Suit and it does all the required monitoring by using the rules defined in the Rule base file. HAWK agent runs on each such machine where hawk rule base monitoring is needed.

14. What Is Hawk Rule Base?

Hawk Rule base is a set of rules which are used for monitoring applications and system’s behavior. Rules defined in a rule base include rule conditions and associated actions which need to be performed. HAWK agent utilizes rule base file for monitoring purposes.

15. What Are Types Of Actions Which Can Be Performed For A Certain Rule Condition?

For any rule defined in TIBCO HAWK, we can have any of the following types of action performed:

• Alert (Generating Alert Messages)
• Execute (to execute certain commands or scripts)
• Notification (To send action notifications)
• Method (To execute some micro agent method as an action)
• Email (to send an email as an action)

16. What Is Purpose Of Tibco Hawk Display?

Hawk Display is a graphical tool which is used to view active agents in the network and allows creation of new rule bases or addition of rules in an existing rule base.

17. What Are Benefits Of Using Tibco Hawk For Monitoring?

TIBCO HAWK based monitoring of systems and applications in a distributed environment helps in dealing with any unexpected or unwanted situations and enables operational teams to take any required measures to avoid any major losses in terms of data and revenue.

TIBCO HAWK works on distributed rule based monitoring principles with low network traffic and optimized use of network bandwidth.

18. Describe An Example Scenario For Defining Hawk Rule Based Monitoring?

Depending on your business flows and business criticality of your applications; hawk rules can be defined for different scenarios. One example scenario can be to create rules for System memory utilization and generate necessary alerts (e.g. Email notifications) when memory usage exceeds a certain threshold.

19. How We Can Check Hawk Alerts In Tibco Administrator?

TIBCO Administrator provides Monitoring Management module which can be used to view all alerts as well as all features of HAWK Console including its micro agents and their methods.

20. What Are Hawk Micro Agents? Describe Micro Agent Methods?

TIBCO Hawk Micro Agents are objects that acts as data source and supports various methods for each type of micro agent which can be used to monitor application and services behavior.

Micro agents communicate with different types of managed objects through its methods to get required information for monitoring purposes. This includes operating system objects, files objects etc.

21. What Is The Usage Of Tibco Hawk Event Source?

TIBCO Hawk Event Service is a console API based application which can be used to record the activities reported by hawk agents in log files. HAWK Event Source can also be configured to take rule based action in response to different hawk events.