As seen earlier in this chapter, active monitoring provides a mechanism for the service administrators to monitor the service from an end user perspective. As part of this mechanism OEM Grid Control provides the beacon and service test infrastructure. While beacons provide the means to execute the service test, the test itself provides the core ability to measure and monitor the business service. Unlike passive monitoring covered in earlier chapters, active monitoring is based on the nature of the business service being monitored. As an example, with passive monitoring the modeling is centered on the infrastructure that provides the service such as hosts, databases, application servers, and so on, and needs not be aware of the nature of the service being offered. However, with active monitoring the service test must be aware of both the nature of the service such as search, reservation, booking, and so on, and must also be aware of the service access mechanism...