Sitworld: Use and Misuse of EPHEMERAL:Y

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #1 – 14 December 2020 – Level 1.00000 Follow on twitter Introduction The ITM protocol modifier EPHEMERAL:Y is wonderful when it is used correctly. When used badly it can cause terrible issues such as communications malfunctioning and causing ITM processes like TEMS to fail and require a recycle to continue. IfContinue reading “Sitworld: Use and Misuse of EPHEMERAL:Y”

Sitworld: Simple Network Testing

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #1 – 6 August 2020 – Level 0.50000 Follow on twitter Inspiration Benchmarking ITM communication links is a tough job. You can validate many aspects using this document ITM Communications Validation But testing for throughput and capacity and errors is tough. Happily a former ITM developer implemented a techniqueContinue reading “Sitworld: Simple Network Testing”

Sitworld: Eliminating Duplicate Agents –

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #5 – 20 August 2020 – Level 0.61000 Follow on twitter NOTE: This was an interesting idea… but I kept running into new special cases that prevented the ideas from working reliably. As a result consider this a failed attempt. At the present time no work is underway. TheContinue reading “Sitworld: Eliminating Duplicate Agents –”

Sitworld: Summarization and Pruning Audit

Version 0.51000 23 March 2020 John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Follow on twitter Inspiration ITM has an marvelous facility to store historical data. This facility includes logic to discard old data and summarize data into longer time periods. It is quite easy to get more data recorded but balancing that with the limited database storageContinue reading “Sitworld: Summarization and Pruning Audit”

Sitworld: ITM Permanent Configuration Best Practices

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #1 – 1/16/2020 – Level 1.00000 Follow on twitter Inspiration I am often asked for advice on how to change an ITM process configuration. It could be something simple like adding a diagnostic trace definition. It could be more complex like adding EPHEMERAL:Y to a communication control. There areContinue reading “Sitworld: ITM Permanent Configuration Best Practices”

Sitworld: Introduction

During my normal work. I see many interesting puzzles on how to accomplish useful work in IBM Tivoli Monitoring [ITM]. Often these revolve around situations. Over time I will present some basic education on the subject but first there are some interesting cases that will benefit from some interactions.  So for the moment, I willContinue reading “Sitworld: Introduction”

Sitworld: Event History #8 Situation Events Opening And Closing Frequently

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #1 – 21 April 2018 – Level 1.00000 Follow on twitter Inspiration The Event History Audit project is complex to grasp as a whole. The following series of posts will track individual diagnostic efforts and how the new project aided in the process. This was seen in the Event Audit History Advisory section:Continue reading “Sitworld: Event History #8 Situation Events Opening And Closing Frequently”

Sitworld: Event History #6 Lost events with Multiple Results with same DisplayItem at same TEMS second

This was seen in the Event Audit History Advisory section:

50,EVENTAUDIT1013W,TEMS,Situations [9] lost [merged] events Multiple Results  with same DisplayItem at same TEMS second – see EVENTREPORT004

Sitworld: Policing the Hatfields and the McCoys

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Draft #1 – 2 May 2016 – Level 0.5000 Follow on twitter Inspiration One more time I had to explain to a customer that you could not have a situation formula that included more than a single multi-row attribute group. They had a worthy goal: they wanted to test for a missingContinue reading “Sitworld: Policing the Hatfields and the McCoys”

Sitworld: Real Time Detection of Duplicate Agent Names

One more time I worked on a case where ITM misbehaved because some agents used duplicate names. This particular case involved “false alerts” where a situation event was observed – a missing process case on a Linux System. When investigated, the Linux System did have that process running and so it was a false positive alert.

Sitworld: Rational Choices for Situation Sampling Intervals

John Alvord, IBM Corporation jalvord@us.ibm.com Inspiration I was working on a customer remote Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Services [TEMS] performance problem. The remote TEMS was showing high CPU utilization and was crashing every couple days. The TEMS Audit report showed that results data from Agents were flowing in at 8 megabytes a minute. That is roughly 10 timesContinue reading “Sitworld: Rational Choices for Situation Sampling Intervals”

Sitworld: ITM Silver Blaze – Agent Responsiveness Checker

I have a great job. People come to me with puzzles and I get paid to investigate. A recent customer had 400+ Solaris systems running Unix OS Agent at ITM 622 FP5 and earlier levels. By chance they identified a single instance of a Unix OS agent that was not running situations. They were naturally worried there could be other cases.

Sitworld: ITM Example Perl/SOAP Data Retrieval

Following was rescued from an IBM Technote after a web area was shut down.   Question How should ITM data be retrieved using Perl/SOAP Answer SOAP – Best Practice and Model Perl Program ITM data can be accessed via Perl/SOAP programs. In some recent cases, such programs severely stressed the hub TEMS with prolonged periodsContinue reading “Sitworld: ITM Example Perl/SOAP Data Retrieval”