7 Using Programmatic Interfaces
107365 Tandem Computers Incorporated
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Previous sections have described how to send textual commands to processes and
retrieve textual results. This section describes how to access two facilities, the
Subsystem Programmatic Interface (SPI) and the Event Management Service (EMS),
that provide a programmatic interface for managing:
Operating system utilities
Tandem products such as Pathway, the TMF subsystem, and SNAX (also known
as subsystems)
Other applications that support these interfaces
SPI and EMS are considered to be programmatic interfaces because information is
represented by coded values, called tokens, which are easier for programs to
manipulate than textual commands and results.
This section does not provide detailed information about SPI or EMS; it does, however,
show how to use TACL to communicate with SPI and EMS. For additional
information, see the Introduction to Distributed Systems Management (DSM), the
Distributed Systems Management (DSM) Programming Manual, and the Event
Management Service (EMS) Manual.
Overview of SPI and
EMS
SPI and EMS are two components of the Distributed System Management (DSM)
product group, a set of software applications, tools, and services that facilitates
management of systems and networks:
SPI is a set of procedures, associated definition files, and programming
conventions used for building, sending, retrieving, and decoding messages sent
between management applications and the Tandem subsystems or business
applications they manage. SPI makes possible the programmatic equivalent of an
interactive command interface, allowing you to automate management tasks. The
following diagram shows how applications interact with SPI:
Tokenized
Messages
Operations Environment
Subsystem Environment
Management
Applications
Subsystems
or
Applications
Objects
SPI
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EMS is a set of processes, associated definition files, tools, and programming
conventions that provides event-message collection, logging, and distribution for
the operating system. (An event is a significant change in some condition in the
system or network, such as a device failure, a notification of limits exceeded, or a