Sunday, June 1, 2008

Listing Situations and their distributions

If you're like me then you've got customers who want to know "Exactly what is being monitored".
They don't want to go to the portal and check for themselves, nor will they use any of the Tools and Scripts which are available.

They just want the list! And they want it now!
What to do, what to do?
ITM has a very nifty feature in which you can extract data from the system using SOAP web services.

I found the exact commands I needed in the Gulfbreeze Blog and in the OrbData site (All the heavy lifting was done by them).

However, the type of person who needs to display this information is probably rather new to ITM and, lets face it, you've got more important things to do right now than learn a few new out-of-the-way features of ITM.

Gulfbreeze and Orbdata assume you know what you're doing. They also give you the data unformatted - i.e. nothing than can be shown to anyone without a lot of massaging of the information.

I'm going to show the simple, cut & paste way of doing it.
(Appendix A of the ITM Administrator's guide goes into all the gory details.)

  1. In order to run a SOAP request, you need two files
    1. In the bin directory of the TEMS server, create a file called URL.txt which contains the text:
      http://TEMSServerName:1920///cms/soap
    2. In the same directory, create a file called SoapRequest.txt and insert the following text:
      (change userid and password to taste)
    3. <CT_Export>
      <filename>data.xml</filename>
      <request>
      <attach>header-data.xml</attach>
      </request>
      <request>
      <CT_Get>
      <userid>sysadmin</userid><password>mypassword</password>
      <table>O4SRV.LOCALTIME</table>
      <sql>
      SELECT TOBJACCL.OBJNAME,TNODELST.NODE
      FROM O4SRV.TNODELST,O4SRV.TOBJACCL
      WHERE TNODELST.NODELIST=TOBJACCL.NODEL AND TNODELST.NODETYPE="V"
      </sql>
      </CT_Get>
      </request>
      </CT_Export>

  2. In order to see the XML data nicely, you need so insert a reference to an XSL file. Add the file header-data.xml into the cms/html directory with the following content:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="kshrpt.xsl"?>
  3. From the bin directory, run the command kshsoap SoapRequest.txt URL.txt (or  CandleSOAPClient on *nix)
  4. You should then find a data.xml file in the cms\html directory. Open it in a web browser and you'll get a nicely formatted table of all the situations and the agents they're associated with.

So what did we do?

We used a CT_Get call to extract the information we wanted. (See the documentation and the other blogs for more details as to what exactly the SELECT does).

We wrapped it in a CT_Export so that we would get an XML file.

We added an attachment to the beginning of the XML file so that we could use the formatting file (which comes with ITM)  to present the information as a proper table and not as an odd looking string.

As I said, the hard part is knowing what SELECT to use, but I hope this little entry will help people.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Thale's Eclipse

More than 2,500 years ago, Thales, one of the first Greek philosopher-scientists, predicted an solar eclipse.
Without the Internet, with no computers, not even decent pen and paper for a scratch pad he managed to use science to predict what, till then, was deemed to be the work of a god.

The eclipse duly took place as he predicted - probably on the 28th of May 585 BC

Here are some links about Thales and his eclipse.

Learning Greek 1

Well, another reason I'm writing this blog is my studies of Greek. I want to learn Ancient Greek because it interests me and I think as as long as I'm studying the Classics, I may as well be able to read the language. Unfortunately, I seem to have some mental blocks...

So, As I review the stuff I should already know, I'll post it here.
I'll start with the Greek Alphabet.

Upper Case Lower case Letter Name English equivalent
Α α Alpha a
Β β Beta b
Γ γ Gamma g
Δ δ Delta d
Ε ε Epsilon e
Ζ ζ Zeta z
Η η Eta e
Θ θ Theta th
Ι ι Iota i
Κ κ Kappa k
Λ λ Lambda l
Μ μ Mu m
Ν ν Nu n
Ξ ξ Xi x / ks
Ο ο Omicron o
Π π Pi p
Ρ ρ Rho r
Σ σ or ς Sigma s
Τ τ Taf t
Υ υ Upsilon u / y
Φ φ Phi ph
Χ χ Chi ch
Ψ ψ Psi ps
Ω ω Omega o


Note : Sigma is written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end.
SOS would be σος

Obviously, Wikipedia has a big page about this.

It there is some problem and the Greek letters don't appear properly, please send me a note...

PULSE for those who missed it...

PULSE, for those who don't know, was a giant Tivoli conference which took place last week in Orlando, Florida.

Lets start with the crunch : The presentations.

Here's the PULSE Blog.

Here's a new IBM initiative : A Web 2.0 Tivoli Community

The new community space looks interesting. It's still very much a work in progress, but go there and look around.

A day in the life of a Tivoli implementer...

Yesterday I installed a small ITM PoC (Proof of Concept) at a customer.

I arrived at their office at about 8:45... and waited at the entrance till 9:30 before the guy I was supposed to meet was located. I should have taken this as an omen.

How long should it take to copy a 4 Giga DVD to the customer's server? About 20-25 minutes I guess.
40 minutes after the copying started, I got a corruption-error on the DVD.

Signing dramatically, I sat down to burn a new DVD as the in-house DBAs started installing the database I had requested to be installed the day before. They couldn't even start the installation because the drive was hardened. Aha! Could that explain my copying misery?

They started a conference call with the system guys to remove the hardening.
It was now about 11:30.
I gave the customer my (newly burned) DVD told him to copy it to the server, unzip it and call me.

I fully expected to wait till next week for that call...

However...

At 13:30 I get a call - the DB is installed and the files have been copied.

I go back and what do you know?
Everything went swimmingly from there on...
By 15:30 I have installed the Tivoli Monitoring server and 5 agents are being monitored.

The biggest problem I had with the installation was the lack of an Adobe Acrobat reader so I could show the customer the documentation.

Just goes to show, what starts out as a bad day just might turn out ok :)

Robert

Monday, May 26, 2008

Phoenix Lands On Mars !

The Phoenix space probe has landed on Mars!

Here are a few links:

The next few weeks will be very interesting...

ITM Tools and scripts

ITM 6.x is a pretty simple system and day-to-day, I don't feel that it needs too much hand holding.
Of course, we never leave the poor thing alone and we're constantly upgrading the system, adding agents and changing situations :)

So, every now and then a problem appears.
There is an excellent presentation which summarizes basic troubleshooting and where to look for problems.
(Logs, trace levels, debugging, process flow and much much more)

ITM 6.1 Problem Determination Tools and Best Practices

It also has links to a series of scripts in OPAL which will enable you to see what's going on in your ITM environment in a simpler way.

Simpler for tech people of course, don't let managers see these scripts :)

for the scripts, go to the OPAL catalog

Enjoy :)