Category — Implementation

Information available here.

Presenter(s): Joy Hawkins

Time: 12 Sep 2008, 11:00 EDT (Eastern Us), 17:00 UK (London), 19:00 CET (Rome)

This STE will cover TBSM BSM Agent (review both MOSWOS and Historical reporting pieces) overview and troubleshooting.

Two new IF’s have been released for TBSM v4.1.1.

IF008 requires IF001 includes IF004, IF005, IF006 and IF007 fixes in addition to the following new fixes.

*READ THE FINE PRINT IN THE READ ME!!!*

When published, it will be available in this directory structure.

IZ23415 DB CLICK ON EVENT IN SERVICE DETAIL NOTHING HAPPENS

When you double click on an event listed on the Event tab of the Service Details viewpoint, nothing happens. Doing the double click on the event, should launch a separate browser window containing
the details associated with the event.

IZ24957 UNABLE TO IMPORT RADSHELL EXPORT OF CONFIG

When the customer first exports their configuration from one system, and then tries to import into another system, they get this error for the import of a data fetcher:
“radshell> // Error: Error parsing input: bsh.TokenMgrError:
Lexical error at line 65, column 133. Encountered: “\r” (13), after :
“\”SELECT JOB_SCH_ST_ID, PCSG_DT, CAL_PCSG_WNDW_CD, BCH_NME, JOB_DESC,
BCH_ID, RUN_NO, JOB_SEQ_NO, AUTO_SYS_STRT_TM, AUTO_SYS_END_TM, ” ”

IZ25602 THINCLIENT IN IE, THE SERVICE DEPENDENCY PAGE HANGS

Thin Client doesn’t show up with IE.

IZ26785 VALUE AND AREA FOR PIE CHART IN TBSM 4.1 IS NOT REPRESENTED

When a user wants to show the annotations on a custom chart, the annotations line up with the incorrect plots on the chart. For example, if the user has a pie chart which displays Test 1 = 1000, Test2 = 2000, Test3 = 3000, and Test4 = 4000; The annotation on each slice showing the value would be like the following: Test1 - annotation is 2000, Test2 - annotation 3000, Test3 - annotation 1000,
Test4 - annotation 4000

IZ26795 POSSIBLE MISSING CLASSES FROM ALL3P.JAR

Unable to save Custom Canvas.

IZ29147 SERVICES VIEWABLE IN VIEWER, BUT NOT SERVICE TREE

When trying to expand a node in the tree to display the children, the plus sign stays a plus sign and no children are displayed. If the parent node is viewed in the service viewer, the children are displayed,
however, one of the children has a display name of “…” The issue only happens when retrieving nodes using an ESDA rule.

171333 CT-3174: 2nd launch of TEP opens separate IE7 browser

On Windows 2008, it was found that the launchtotep.vbs script is failing to work the same way it does in all of the other versions of Windows. Where the script is not able to re-use the same open browser
window already open to TEP.

IF009 is a TBSM-TADDM Discovery Library Toolkit integration IF. This supersedes IF003.

Available here.

INCORRECT REPRESENTATION OF TADDM FUNCTIONAL GROUPS (IZ12647)

After editing a TADDM business application, and removing members of a functional group, a delta import does not removed the objects from the TBSM service.

TADDM will send an update for a functional group the first time that a resource is added to the functional group. If the resource is removed from a functional group, and then later added again, an
update is not sent. This results in the functional group not being added back into the service in TBSM.

LOOPING CONDITION IN IMPORTED BUSINESS SERVICE TREE (IZ05790)

TBSM loses the knowledge that a resource was built from an ESDA; after which, when the service component repository informs the base TBSM server that a resource no longer exists, the base server
ignores the information and leaves the resource as is. This only applies to customers that have upgraded from TBSM 4.1.

LOOP IN THE SERVICE TREE WITH AN NFSSERVICE (IZ12344)

Business services containing an NFSService object contain a loop between the computer system and the NFSService.

MSVCR71.dll NOT FOUND ON WINDOWS SYSTEM (IZ26000)

The Discovery Library toolkit will not start on Windows. Running the command “xmltoolkitsvc.exe -d -t” reveals that the system cannot find msvcr71.dll.

DUPLICATE ROUTERS AND SWITCHES IN THE COMPONENT REGISTRY (IZ26267)

Business applications built in TADDM that include routers and switches show two instances of each device when the business application is imported into TBSM.

FILTER ON TADDM BUSINESS APPLICATION LIFECYCLESTATE (168719)

The ability to import a subset of the TADDM business applications.

With Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) v4.2 planned for general availability within the next few months, I feel that it’s very important that I provide some insight into things that all of our current (any version) and prospective TBSM clients begin to consider in advance of their migration/upgrade to or initial deployment of TBSM v4.2 in the near future.

The next generation of Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) is different and offers opportunities for reevaluating the past to succeed in the future. The architectural options, operating scenarios, product features and capabilities are likely significantly different than those you may be currently using today. To fully exploit the new release, I will be sharing some thoughts and ideas for you to consider as you plan for your upgrade/migration or initial deployment.

First off, I strongly encourage you to not treat your migration and upgrade as just another routine step in the TBSM maintenance lifecycle. I strongly recommend that you reevaluate how you’ve used TBSM in the past. You may not need to do everything you’ve done previously – and probably shouldn’t anyway. There may be many more efficient alternative approaches you should consider.

I’d start be brainstorming some fairly simple and straightforward questions.

• Are you getting the expected value from your previous TBSM deployment?
• Does it provide measurable benefit to the business?
• Is it a critical application, used daily or something that’s occasionally referenced?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do you know exactly why something is in there, what causes it to turn red, yellow or green?
• Is it kept up to date and accurate?
• Do you enjoy using TBSM within your operating environments?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do your operations and support teams “trust” what you’re showing them?

If it’s hard for you to answer these questions or your answers are less than positive, it’s really important that you think deeply about how you’ll adopt TBSM v4.2 within your environment. I strongly believe that with the right strategy, roadmap, design and plans, you can significantly improve your implementation of TBSM and its acceptance within your organization.

Furthermore, I’ve seen far too many operating environments over the past few years that have yet to adopt a true consolidated operations environment. Are you operating in a silo with your current TBSM deployment? Is TBSM only used for the network, distributed or mainframe group within your organization? Why? Why not consider leveraging the industry leading capabilities of the Netcool/OMNIbus dependency and deploy a consolidated TBSM architecture? Work the organizational problems; establish the vision for consolidated operations and true end-to-end service management within TBSM. You have the technology and product capability, why not use it? Your chances of realizing true value oriented Business Service Management are very poor if you can’t work towards this consolidated model.

The more effort and time you place in architecture, design and planning, the more successful you will be. Your tactical efforts will ultimately fail without a strategic direction and purpose. TBSM v4.2 and the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP) platform offers many new architectural options to consider. Become familiar with these and the plans for broader based TIP adoption across the Tivoli portfolio. If you have a goal of a consolidated TIP architecture servicing the needs of numerous core products, the typical enterprise tools groups will need to ramp up skill sets in this new area quickly. Capacity planning, performance, large scale high availability and failover are all areas worthy of significant investigation and testing.

If you own other soon to be TIP enabled products such as Netcool/WebTop or Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM), how will you design and implement a consolidated platform for multiple TIP enabled products? Will you take advantage of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability? How will you plan for broad based TCR usage? Will you use a batch oriented reporting mode to avoid potential performance impacts on the core products? What will your access, authentication and authorization schema be? How will you leverage the new Single Sign On (SSO) capability?

I’ll try and cover as many areas as I can without getting into any confidential areas while products are not in a GA state. I think there are a lot of things that should be done now and even more as the products are GA and available for you to explore within your lab or development environments.

Next up - the importance of events.

Shameless plug

IBM Tivoli Services and our TBSM AAA Accredited Business Partners are always available to help advise and consult with you in these areas. Please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime and I can help arrange further discussions.

Hopefully this OPAL whitepaper from one of our ATG folks makes our crazy TSRM - Netcool/OMNIbus integration a bit easier to understand and configure.

I still really have no idea why we’ve taken the concept of ticketing integration and made it so difficult. As an alternative to this approach, if you own Netcool/Impact you can look at this OPAL paper which uses WebServices. This approach needs to be validated against TSRM v7.x.

A new IF is available for TBSM v4.1.1 addressing a few new areas (don’t see mine in there!). This depends on IF 001 and supersedes IF 004, 005 and 006. IF 007 can be downloaded here.

These are the new issues addressed:

IZ15914 INCONSISTENT SERVICE NAME TRUNCATIONS IN SERVICE TREE
Service name truncation is not consistent when using the static sizing tool. Many of the service names will truncate, but some do not.

IZ19833(NGF) NEED THE TBSM LOGON SCREEN TO BE ABLE TO ACCEPT MORE THAN 16 CHARACTERS
Integrated authentication works only if the password is short and when a longer password is used it causes the account in Active Directory to be locked.

This APAR increases the allowable length of the password to 127 characters - which is the Active Directory limit.

IZ20375 CREATING CUSTOM CANVASSES USING IE CAUSES HANG WHEN USING DE
When trying to either create a new custom canvas or edit an existing custom canvas, the canvas would fail during loading and the console would show the following error:

[Fatal Error] ServInst.xml:2:64: White spaces are required between
publicId and systemId. Exception in thread “Thread-12″
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:

IZ24515 UNABLE TO SAVE SERVICE INSTANCES
The customer edits a service and clicks on the dependencies tab when the customer adds or removes dependent services, the change cannot be saved. The save screen will show up when the save button
is pressed, however, it will never go away and changes made are not saved.

IZ26602 PERSISTENT ESDA INSTANCE HAS A PARENT RULE FAILS TO SHOW UP IN
When there are persistent ESDA instances that belong to a template with a parent rule, they will not be displayed at the root of the tree even if they have no actual parents. Thus there will be no way
to see them.

This fix only applies to persistent ESDA instances that has no parents. If you want to enable the old behavior to not show the instances in the root of the tree set the following:

In RAD_sla.props
impact.sla.showesdainstanceswithparentrules=false

The default for this property is true, which will show these instances at the root of the tree.

In an repost of an article from a couple years back, Robin Bloor provides some updated color on the state of BPM and SoA. It’s apparent that some of the other “B” buzz words have the same challenges that exist on the BSM front.

Things to ponder…

• How can these projects with such touted value to the business or IT be successfully implemented?
• Where are vendors falling short in helping “solve the organizational problems” that often cause these “B” projects to fail?
• Is throwing technology/product at the problem the best place to start?
• What should a next generation organizational structure look like? Can IT and Business organize around end-to-end business service/process delivery and support?
• How can organizations be incented, encouraged, mandated to have an end-to-end business service/process focus?
• Where success stories for BPM, SOA, BSM, BAM, etc. exist, how have these technologies been operationalized, organizations changed, workflow/process/procedure modified to reap the benefits?
• Is it foolish to think that any of these organizational challenges can ever be solved or at least minimized?
• Do we have generational issues here that will change as Baby Boomers retire and Gen X/Y/Z move up the ranks in IT and Business?

Give the post a read, I found these two very applicable to all of the things I’m seeing with BPM, BSM, BAM, etc.

Question 5: What are the most difficult steps within a BPM project – and what makes a SOA project tedious?

For an Oracle or DB2 database? Thoughts? Reasons why?

What about the manager of a DBA group or other higher level manager? What DBA specific information should be aggregated to present at this higher level?

Lots of fixes in this. Everyone should review. Depends on IF001 and supersedes IF004 and IF005. Available here.

This Interim Fix addresses problems reported in IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.1.1.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IZ13211 RADSHELL CAN’T USE HTTPS

When TBSM is configured to connect to Security manager via ssl, the rad_radshell script doesn’t work.

IZ14054 REAL-TIME INDICATORS IN CUSTOM CANVAS HARD-CODED

When custom canvas exists, if a users adds anything else to the canvas and saves the changes the old canvas icons never update. User will have to add all icons at one time and save if they want to
continuously see changes to the custom canvas. This fix will only work for brand new canvas creation. Current canvases with numerical data in the value fields in the layoutxml files, will have to be recreated in order for this fix to work since the rule has been wiped out of the file.

IZ15514 HITTING THE TAB WHERE THERE IS NO INSTANCE DEFINED

When viewing the custom canvas, the edit tab displays NoInstanceDefined if no instance was tied to the custom canvas. However, users can still click the tab and see previously displayed data.

IZ15295 CUSTOMER IS NOT ABLE TO VIEW SLA CHARTS PAGE

When displaying the SLA Charts page from the drop down tool, an error occurs and no chart information is displayed.

IZ17751 CONFIGURING MULTIPLE TBSM SERVERS CONCURRENTLY FROM A SINGLE

Customer is unable to create ESDA rules on 2 seperate TBSM servers simultaneously from the same client machine, the 2nd ESDA popup corrupts the 1st one that ESDA rules were being created for.

IZ17754 DATA FETCHER TO ORACLE DB RETURNS ERRONEOUS TIME VALUE,

After IF1, the customer’s data fetchers that go to an Oracle database and retrieve a timestamp column, incorrectly show oracle.sql.TIMESTAMP instead of the actual timestamp values.

IZ19449 TEMPLATE RULE THRESHOLDS ARE INCORRECTLY DISPLAYED

Template rule thresholds are incorrectly displayed after the first rule is viewed. Customer views a template rule with marginal and bad thresholds set, and any other template rule that is viewed after this that has marginal and bad thresholds, displays the values that were seen with the first rule. The marginal and bad threshold values are not updated based on the new rules that are viewed.

IZ19688 MOUSE CLICKS NOT RECOGNIZED IN SERVICE ADMIN IN CERTAIN

If the customer switches pages or logs out and back in again, the interactions stops working. When using Firebug to debug this issue you will find that the ActionRegistry.jsp file gives a 404 error saying that the /desktop/ActionRegistry.jsp cannot be found. This issue seems to happen when the customer has custom pages with actions.

IZ20394 NUMERIC FORMULA DATA INCORRECT AFTER RADSHELL EXPORT/IMPORT.

When importing a service model via the radshell script, the Use Policy box is checked for the Internal attributes even though no policy was being before exporting the file.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix from IF0005:

IZ17042 MOSWOS TBSM AGENT MONITORS INCORRECT OMNIBUS UNIX PROCESS

TBSM Process Control Agent does not accurately reflect status of the process control agent. Regardless of whether the process control daemon is up or down, it shows as Down in the Process
Control Agent view of the TBSM Agent workspace.

IZ17159 THE DIRECTSQL FUNCTION SI NOT AVAILABLE BY DEFAULT FOR POLICY WRITING.

The option to use this function by default is not provided for policy writing in the ESDA Edit Policy window.

IZ15468 SERVICE INSTANCE IN MAINTENANCE TURNS GREEN BEFORE MAINTENANCE

A service in maintenance state should remain blue color, until the maintenance schedule is complete, However, if an event comes in that clears the service, the service instance and status in the Services tree turns green (not stay blue until maintenance is complete).

IZ15409 WHEN TBSM CHECKS THE STATUS OF THE DATABASE, IT CAN CAUSE THE DATABASE TO CRASH

After TBSM runs for a while, the status of the database is checked and TBSM crashes with the following error in the RAD_server.log file:

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix from IF0004:

IY99094 ISM REPORTS FAIL TO LAUNCH FROM RAD UI

ISM Report Launched from RAD has no info in it. The new window pops up to display the graph and info? but there is no info on the graph.

IZ09057 DATA FETCHER STOPS WORKING DUE TO LOST DATABASE CONNECTIONS.

Data fetchers fail to access their specified data source. Message ‘Exception Executing Query’ may be received. Logs report ‘Exception while executing database operation after trying twice. Exception: Io exception: Broken pipe’.

IZ09754 “INSERT ACTION FUNCTION” FOR RADSHELL FUNCTION IS NOT WORKING.

When trying to insert the RadShell function into a custom policy via the Impact policy editor the following message is returned:HTTP Status 500 -

IZ10261 CUSTOM CANVAS EDIT FAILS AFTER REFRESH

Various java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError messages are being generated when viewing custom canvasses.

IZ12362 CUSTOM CANVAS THE TAB TITLES ARE NOT ALWAYS CORRECT

When clicking on a custom canvas that is not tied to a service instance,the context of the Edit Service tab shows either ‘false’ or the named value of the previously clicked service instance, template, or tied custom canvas.

IZ12777 SERVICES IN SERVICE VIEWER NOT AUTOMATICALLY SIZED TO THE WINDOW

When viewing or creating a custom canvas, the size of the object added to the custom canvas is not automatically fit to the size of the canvas.

IZ13840 LOCALESET ISSUE WITH TBSM4.1.1 (I18N) UNABLE TO WORK WITH LANG=ZH_CN

Solaris only

IZ13303 SETUP.SH’S ON DVD 2 FOR SOLARIS FAIL

When running the setup.sh script for the TBSM language pack as described for Solaris, the following error message is received:
./setup.sh: test: unknown operator == Installation cannot be performed.