You monitor and manage your Enterprise Manager environment via incidents and not discrete events (even though an incident can conceivably consist of a single event). Of all events raised within your managed environment, there is likely only a subset that you need to act on because they impact your business applications (such as a target down event). However, managing by incident also allows you to address more complex situations where the subset of events you are interested in are related and may indicate a higher level issue needs to be addressed as a single issue and not as individual events: A cluster of events by themselves may indicate a minor administrative issue, but when viewed together may signify a larger problem that can potentially consist of events from multiple domains/layers of your monitored infrastructure.

For example, you are monitoring a host. If you want to monitor 'load' being placed on one or more hosts you might be interested in events such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and swap utilization exceeding acceptable metric thresholds. Individually, these events may or may not indicate an issue with the host, but together, these events form an incident indicating extreme load is being placed on a monitored host.

Incidents represent the larger service disruptions that may impact your business instead of discrete events. Managing by incidents, therefore, allows you to monitor for complex operational issues that may affect multiple domains that may impact your business. These incidents typically need to be tracked, assigned to appropriate personnel, and resolved as quickly as possible. You can effectively implement a centralized monitoring that consolidates monitoring information and more effectively allocate resource across your ecosystem to resolve or prevent issues from occurring. The end result is better implementation of your business processes that in turn lead to better performance of your IT resources.

While events indicate issues requiring attention in your managed environment, it is more efficient to work on a collective subset of related events as a single unit of work-- you can work on different events representing the same issue or you can work on one incident containing multiple space-related events. For example, you have multiple space events from various targets that indicate you are running low on space. Instead of managing numerous discrete events, you can more efficiently manage a smaller set of incidents.

An incident is a significant event or set of related significant events that need to be managed because it can potentially impact your business applications. These incidents typically need to be tracked, assigned to appropriate personnel, and resolved as quickly as possible. You perform these incident management operations through Incident Manager, an intuitive UI within Enterprise Manager.

Incident Manger provides you with a central location from which to view, manage, diagnose and resolve incidents as well as identify, resolve and eliminate the root cause of disruptions. See Incident Manager for more information about this UI.