New to Tivoli Monitoring?

I'll assume you're a new recruit to your IT company and you now must start working with a product called IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM).

Where to start? What to do?

In a (very brief) nutshell, ITM is one of a series of Tivoli products. The entire Tivoli suite is designed to help companies manage and understand the various pieces of computer technology they use. ITM manages the servers and applications that the company uses. Remember Mission control in the movie Apollo 13? Well, they were using NASA specific systems, but the analogy holds - they were using a product which monitors and controls the spacecraft, just like ITM does to the servers.

First day on the job, someone has given you a welcome speech, shown you your chair and you've scribbled your user/password on a note.
What now? How to find information about ITM?

There are three types of websites which will help you
1. IBM documentation
2. Forums
3. Personal / Company websites

The first places you should go are

* http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v15r1/index.jsp?toc=/com.ibm.itm.doc/toc.xml
Here you'll find the basic documentation. Especially click on Understanding -> Exploring IBM Tivoli Monitoring
* ITM "homepage" in IBM's website
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/monitor/
* As well as documentation, IBM also publishes Redbooks - which are in depth "how-to" books.
For example : End-to-End Planning for Availability and Performance Monitoring or
Implementation and Performance Optimization for Large Scale Environments
The main website for the redbooks is at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

There are two main public forums for ITM

* IBM's Developerworks site
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=796
* TME10 Mailing list (This is also on developerworks)
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/sysmgmt/products/support/TME10.html