As of ITM 6.2.1, there is a perceived capability to now rename situations within the editor.

However, the rename is actually a new attribute called ‘Full Name’ and only changes the TEPS display name for the situation; the EIF will still send the original situation name.

IBM responds this is “working as designed” — a load of crap if you ask me and a “feature” that should not have been introduced at all if it were to be so counter-intuitive.

Here’s IBM’s response:

Problem(Abstract)
Situation names that are less than 32 characters in length do not populate the “Fullname” field when running the ‘tacmd viewsit -s ‘ command.

Symptom
tacmd viewsit shows null Fullname Field

Cause
The Fullname field is only populated when the original situation name is 32 characters or greater or if a situation name is changed.

Resolving the problem
When a situation is created with a name less than 32 characters in length, the situation name is stored in the “Name” column. At this point, the “Name” column serves two purposes: a unique ID for the situation and the situation display name. The “Fullname” column is blank.

If an existing situation name is changed, the “Name” column still serves as the unique ID and will not be updated to reflect the situation name change.

The new situation name is stored in the “Fullname” column, the new name now assumes the role of situation display name. The length of the new name does not matter, the new name must be stored in the “Fullname” column, since the “Name” column containing the unique ID cannot be changed.

The only time we should expect the “Full Name” field to be populated is when the original situation name is 32 characters or greater or when a situation name has changed from it’s original name (regardless of the length of the new situation name).

Situation

An ITM6 Unix (UX) or Linux (LZ) agent detects that its remote filesystems are unavailable, a “stale” connection.

Automate an action to remount it if possible

Methodology

Two (2) ITM situations are created where

1. detects the mount point has become stale
   
2. the other is triggered by the “correlated situation” condition of #1 being tr
   

Situation #1 : Detect “Stale” remote FS

Simple enough – if “Space Available” fails collection, there is an issue

Situation #2 : Remount Situation

Formula Conditions

Use the “Situation Comparison” for a condition against the situation above

Take Action

Note: the lines are strung together on one line in the Take Action field, to make it more legible here, newlines are after the semicolons

f=”&{Linux_Disk.Mount_Point}” ;
u=`umount -f $f 2>&1 && echo $f`;
m=`mount $f 2>&1 && echo $f`;
echo -e “umount: $u\nmount:$m” | mail -s “ITM ACTION: Remount $f” junkmail@JdsMedia.net

ITM v6 log files use a hexadecimal timestamp (to save space? who the hell knows), which adds unnecessary effort when the reason you’re looking at the logs is to determine an issue in the first place. In any case… Here’s the script I wrote when I first encountered the nonsense in ITM v6 logs a few years ago:

#!/bin/perl
foreach (<STDIN>) {
if (/^[^\s\d\w]+([\w\d]*)/) {
@t=localtime(hex($1));
$time=sprintf(“%02d:%02d:%02d %02d/%02d/%04d”,
$t[2],$t[1],$t[0],$t[4]+1,$t[3],$t[5]+1900);s/^[^\s\w\d]+[\w\d]*/$time/;}print $_;}

Here’s a one-liner that Venkat.Saranathan at Gulfsoft.com cranked out, rendering my script pretty much obsolete

perl -lane ‘if ($_ =\ /^(.)([\dA-F]+)(\..*)/) { printf “%s%s%s”, $1, scalar(localtime(oct(“0x$2″))),$3; }’

In a nutshell: use the ‘eventcreate‘

I had an issue with ITM Windows Agent creating events which I was then sending out email alerts via a UNIX script.

The simple problem was backslashes in windows paths where the “Take Action” notification script was literalizing characters which might be part of the EventLog Description

For example:

"c:\Damned these\nagging\slashes\argh"

became

c:\Damned these
agging\slashesrgh

Yes, simply quoting my string would have solved most of my problem, IT DID HOWEVER lead me to a handy windows command for testing, called ‘eventcreateid‘

Example : eventcreate /ID 101 /SO FooBar /D “Test Message for ITM” /T ERROR /L Application

ITM v6 log files use a hexadecimal timestamp (to save space? who the hell knows), which adds unnecessary effort when the reason you’re looking at the logs is to determine an issue in the first place. In any case…

Here’s the script I wrote when I first encountered the nonsense in ITM v6 logs a few years ago:

#!/bin/perl

foreach (<STDIN>) {
 if (/^[^\s\d\w]+([\w\d]*)/) {
  @t=localtime(hex($1));
  $time=sprintf("%02d:%02d:%02d %02d/%02d/%04d",
  $t[2],$t[1],$t[0],$t[4]+1,$t[3],$t[5]+1900);
  s/^[^\s\w\d]+[\w\d]*/$time/;
 }
  print $_;
}

Here’s a one-liner that Venkat.Saranathan at Gulfsoft.com cranked out, rending my script pretty much obsolete

perl -lane 'if ($_ =\ /^(.)([\dA-F]+)(\..*)/) { printf "%s%s%s", $1, scalar(localtime(oct("0x$2"))),$3; }'

As a Tivoli consultant, I’ve had to tweak, torque and tune ITM v6 to fulfill requirements not met out of the box. Several of my clients have felt ripped off by IBM for having paid for a product billed as covering best practices out of the box, only to discover, there is significant development costs involved.

I’m going to itemize and update the shortcomings as I think or run across them, and in all fairness, update if ITM fills the void.

Situations

1. Attributes, values and situation specific data is not passed to the ‘Take Action” command
   • Typically this is passed in the shell’s environment
   • However, these important pieces of info ARE passed to the EIF
2. Inability to determine what situations are running on which systems, or reversed, inability to derive which situations are running on any particular system

Windows Agent

1. No regular expressions for directory/file matching

Unix Agent

1. No regular expressions for directory/file matching (Unix and Linux)

Oracle Agent (ITMfDatabases)

1. (<= v6.2.0) Does not detect listeners if dynamically configured

Par for the course with IBM Tivoli’s porting of aqcuired products and their attempt at integrating them together, the ITM Agent for the a Netcool’s Omnibus  does not install in the expected $CANDLEHOME.

IBM has opened an enhancement request based on the PMR I opened. My workaround below.

Problem title
TEMA for Omnibus does support optional $CANDLEHOME paths
.
Problem description Read the rest of this entry »

ITM 6.2 FP1 contains several new and changed T/EC class changes, ranging from new classes, new slots, and only ONE new slot (omnux_value replacing kux_value).

**I have not seen an ITM event containing kux_value nor omnux_value, but to be safe, I added the old ‘kux_value’ slot to the kux.baroc file.

TOTAL: 22 baroc files

Not all of them mind you, but some important ones none-the-less:

• KFW_STARTJVM=N
• KFW_USE_EMBEDDED=Y
• KFW_EWAS_SERVER_PID_FILE=C:\IBM\ITM\CNPSJ\profiles\ITMProfile\logs\ITMServer\ITMServer.pid
• KFW_EWAS_STARTSERVER_SCRIPT=C:\IBM\ITM\CNPSJ\profiles\ITMProfile\bin\startServer.bat
• KFW_EWAS_STOPSERVER_SCRIPT=C:\IBM\ITM\CNPSJ\profiles\ITMProfile\bin\stopServer.bat

I verified the following by modifying all the variables in my %CANDLEHOME%\CNB\kfwenv file where numerical values like ports and max where incremented by one, and the string vlaues had _XXX_ inserted

The modified kfwenv was backed up, then I reconfigured the TEPS and ran a diff on both files, and the above variables are the resulting default values.

This is a brain-dead situation, but I’ve been bit by the “ITM Connector” dialog box hiding behind the MTEMS configuration window.

Anytime you reconfigure the TEPS (Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server) via MTEMS (Manage Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring), sometimes that little box just hangs back there until you move the MTEMS window.

Very innocuous problem that isn’t really a problem, just an annoyance.

Tivoli MTEMS not responding or hangs