Enhancements for IBM Z HMC Messages & Audit Log Management via Remote Syslog Server

HSBC is looking to use the remote SYSLOG capability on HMC to improve the observability on the healthiness of the automated processes running within the HMC and the overall healthiness of the processor hardware. In the process of setting up the new monitoring and alerting, we have identified the following deficiencies in the existing monitoring functions:

1) There is no message ID associated with the Hardware (HW) Messages and impose difficulties in the message monitoring as we need to interpret the free-form text in the message and alert based on certain eye catcher.

2) There is no severity associated with the HW Messages to indicate the importance of the message. Again from the monitoring and alerting perspective, need to interpret the free-form text to understand the importance of the message and response appropriately.

3) The HW messages forwarded to the remote SYSLOG server only contains the summary without the details and currently the HMC has the Web Service APIs to allow customer to retrieve the details. However, we will also require an API to delete specific HW message after the message is act upon without the need to logon to the HMC manually.

4) From the Audit log perspective, not all the OOCoD related audit messages have the record ID associated and it is required to have such association in order to track the status of the operation for the CoD records.

5) When a PMR is being raised by the call home process, there should be audit events to indicate the progress of such action and provide the PMR number once the PMR is opened successfully. This could enhance the observability of such a process within HMC and provide another channel to have timely notification to the support team to response to the case.