Course Description
You will cover best practices on rules development, and expand upon the basic techniques learned in the Basic Rules Programming course.

In this course, you will cover the building blocks of programming rules, and learn how to perform file input output, atom manipulation and develop your own custom templates.

Objectives
This course enables you to build the necessary knowledge and skills to:

• Design and develop an ITEC Rules based solution
• Manipulate external files within rules
• Perform string/numeric/list manipulation within rules
• Define custom templates
• Write rules using custom defined templates
• Work with fact files and the recorded database
• Use the Prolog Compiler
• Use the Event Sequence templates to define a Causal Chain

Who will benefit from this course
This course is intended for System Administrators who are responsible for programming and supporting TEC rules.

Required Skills Knowledge
Familiarity with an appropriate text editor is required.

While not a requirement for this class, knowledge of programming concepts would be beneficial. It is also recommended that you have some experience using programming languages such as Prolog, Rexx, shell scripting, or similar languages.

This course will build on concepts learned in the "Programming Rules for the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console 3.9" course, and that course is a pre-requisite for attending this course.

Prerequisites

• IBM Tivoli Infrastructure
• IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console
• Programming Rules for IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console

Course Outline

• Introduction i
• Introduction into course, objectives, pre-requisites.
• Review of the TEC Architecture
• The life of an event, Detailed TEC process description and configuration. Version Control
• Default Rulesets
• Preconfigured rule sets that provide support for processing common application and infrastructure events.
• Files, Variables and Regular Expressions
• List Processing and Backtracking
• Building a Knowledge base.
• Work with fact files, using the Prolog Compiler manually and using the Recorded Database
• Custom templates
• Writing custom templates, and using "user_predicates"
• The Causal Chain
• Define a Causal Chain, work with the Event Sequence Predicates, and Event Criteria Predicates

The focus of the course will be on the practical nature of programming rules and consist of many hands-on activities.