Obtaining Product Codes for IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM v6)

Local method:

Parse the proddsc.tbl file on a UNIX/Linux system to get the list by doing this:

UNIX
awk -F\| '/^[^*#]/ {print $1,$2}' ${CANDLEHOME}/registry/proddsc.tbl | sort | uniq


Or, IBM’s site http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=2366&context=SSZ8F3&dc=DB520&dc=DB560&uid=swg21265222&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct2366tivoli

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

Not that there is a lot to the TDW layout, but knowing the schema assists in the documentation process and developing queries and procedures of the TDW (Tivoli Data Warehouse).

Make short work of this by using the opensource tools of SchemaSpy and Graphviz

SchemaSpy is a jar file that supports over 21 DBs, including the 3 supported by ITM TDW (Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL) and is run from the command line to generate a html directory of content about the interrogated schema.

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 »

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

Based on http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v24r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itm.doc/itm_admin_6284.htm

The following table describes the meaning of the situation event statuses and the setting of the common slots in the generated Tivoli Enterprise Console event.
Read the rest of this entry »

Command: du (mneumonic: disk usage)

How can one get the disk usage of a directory, but didn’t want the directories which are mountpoints of other filesystems…

The disk usage calculation can be limited to the actual mounted partition with the -x flag.

## Notice the size differences below
tivoli@tivdzl01:~> du -smx /
11325   /

tivoli@tivdzl01:~> du -sm /
63478   /

[ NOTE : The size differences are due to df getting the filesystem info based on 512byte blocks ]