Summary

The WebSphere middleware management facility provides you with the means to create a variety of different WebSphere network topologies – of nodes and applications servers and cells – and to construct relationships between the topology of the system and the specific applications that you want to deploy on it. The middleware management facility enables you to define the relationships between your applications and the resources they depend on.

However, it is not the objective of the middleware management facility to manage either your entire system or the resources that your application depends on. For this, you will want to make use of an enterprise management facility such as those provided by Tivoli, Candle, BMC, Wiley, Mercury, and others. You can use the rich set of programming interfaces that WebSphere provides to introduce your own management scripts and programs to automate various aspects of management. These will be described in the next chapter.