Complex plugins and non-oracle component active management

Question

Hi guys
I'm a newbie to OEM Grid Control and I need your assitance in the following subject.
My question is - is there any possibility to develop complex plugins with dynamic behavior and that would allow me not only to MONITOR (i.e. observe metrics of) some non-oracle component but also to MANAGE it.
To explain my question, I'll give you an example.
I've developed plugin for IBM MQSeries that does simple thing: it displays a list of queues and their current depth (number of messages currently in a queue) and fullness percentage of each queue. Once the percentage exceeds warning (70%) or critical (90%) threshold, an alert gets fired. Works fine and looks fine.
But I also need a possibility to click on a queue name and get to another screen that will show me a list of messages in a chosen queue. Further I need a possibility to filter messages by entering, say, JMS Message Selector expression. Further I need a possibility to select some messages (e.g. using checkboxes) and, say, remove them from a queue.
As we see, this is a "dynamic" functionality by nature, because the list of queues may change as well as a set of messages in any queue may change.
Questions:
1). Is there any way to implement such a plugin or set of plugins?
2). If there's a way, could you please suggest or provide links to any documentation in this respect? Where can I read/learn about writing such plugins?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Dennis

Answer 1

Extensibility of EM has always concentrated on the monitoring aspect for external software/hardware because data and its collection can be abstracted to the point where EM can get it and display it for a variety of products.
Management of those products tends to be much more complex since each target will have its own operations and workflows for how to get things done. So whatever administration tools delivered with the product will always be better suited than EM to do administration since it knows exactly what it has to do.
That's not to say that you can't do management through EM. The job system is robust and allows you to run OS command jobs that would enable scripts you have to do the management. In the 10.2.0.3 release, you will be able to create new job types that are specific to your target type.
As for the particular case you cited, I would create a new metric with queue name and message id as a key. Then you could create a report that displays messages from a certain queue or drill down into the All Metrics page to look at the messages for a particular queue. Then create a job that takes as input enough information to delete a message or messages from a queue (you'd have to write the script that would do that).