 | Level: Introductory Abdi Salahshour (abdis@us.ibm.com), Problem Determination Architect, IBM
Kalpana Doraisamy (kdoraisa@in.ibm.com), Staff Software Engineer, IBM
Ajay G Rengasayee, Software engineer, Freelance
24 Jul 2007 This four-part series is a comprehensive usage guide that gives you an
overview of the Log and Trace Analyzer for Java ™ Desktop, instructs you in the
installation process and teaches you to configure the tool correctly. The series
includes performance-enhancing tips, integration and hands-on scenarios, as well as
data on the IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 Events Tool. Discover how your data can be more consumable from start to finish and learn how to
reduce your problem determination and maintenance costs. In part two, get an overview of the LTA-JD, discover an installation and configuration guide for the tool, and view a table of the main functions of the tool.
The purpose of this series of articles
is to have, in a single place, a number of resources related to helping you make your data more consumable from start to finish and to helping you reduce your problem determination and maintenance costs.
The first
article in the series discusses the current obstacles to effective data
collection:
-
The complexity of e-business systems. Today's business systems are a collection of distributed and heterogeneous software and hardware components.
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The variety of data and collectors/adapters. Because of the variety of
collectors and the vastness of the data collected, there are several problems that are
created. These include: how to consume and publish proprietary data formats; how to
make differing design and standards co-exist; how to integrate ad hoc and
product-specific code; how to integrate the different skill sets required to configure,
maintain, and tune the various systems; and how to overcome the difficulty in correlating for enterprise-to-enterprise problem diagnostics.
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Overcoming instrumentation differences. Instrumentation differences include
topics such as standards compliance, customer inconvenience and cost of ownership. In
addition, when standardization is lacking, Management Tools (the consumers) need to be
instrumented for every Managed Resource (the
producers) with which they interact; the same is true in reverse. This is both costly and inefficient.
This article delivers an overview of the LTA-JD and an installation and configuration guide
for the tool, as well as discusses overall functions.
In the following articles:
- Take a visual tour of the technology, get troubleshooting tips and learn to maximize
the performance out of the LTA-JD.
- Dive into the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Events Tool view of the LTA-JD.
Introducing the tool
The event visualization of Log and Trace Analyzer - Java Desktop (LTA-JD) utilizes the
concepts of autonomic computing to represent, detect, evaluate, and resolve incidents and
problems related to the IT infrastructure management and operations. In addition, symptom
visualization and processing methods are suggested in order to enable pro-active
prevention of these incidents and problems before they happen. The benefits of
understanding and using the LTA-JD are:
- It makes the management data more consumable to the end-user because
- It gives you visualization of product symptoms from within problem determination tooling.
- Symptoms (patterns) are more deterministic than individual events.
- It helps reduce problem determination costs since
- Administrators can use automated event correlation to recognize symptoms and corrective actions.
- Support personnel access symptoms directly from the problem determination tools.
- Cross-product symptom catalogs allow quick diagnosis for known errors.
- It helps reduce maintenance costs since
- Incremental improvements to symptom databases will reduce requests to Level 1,
2, and 3 support. Level 1 is the first line of support that answers when the customer
calls. Level 2 support is implemented when Level 1 cannot resolve the problem and
usually includes a more knowledgeable support engineer such as the product's subject
matter expert. Level 3 support is offered by those who are considered change team or development members that change the code and provide fixes.
The triage functionality of the LTA-JD, coupled with the superior visualization
mechanisms offered improves root cause analysis, problem prediction, and resolution.
Domain expertise and symptom rules can be easily mined and captured using industry
standard XPath expressions for quick detection and visualization of symptomatic events.
Figure 1 shows a matrix of the Log and Trace Analyzer family of products on two
spectra -- analysis capabilities and user skills.
Figure 1. The Log and Trace Analyzer family
LTA-JD sits at the starting corner, but don't sell it short. It can enable end-to-end viewing of event sources across the heterogeneous environment, provide a customizable summary view, and offer the ability to select and expand any row from the summary view to display the full Common Base Event attributes. With it, you can also do multi-level filtering and sorting on any event properties, custom highlight triage events (single symptoms definitions), and save and share configuration settings.
The architecture
Figures 2 and 3 provide a look at the overall architecture of the LTA-JD.
Figure 2. The overall architecture
Figure 2 illustrates the LTA-JD simplified architecture. It shows LTA-JD's main components
and how information flows between these components. The figure demonstrates the following LTA-JD main capabilities:
- A generic event source normalization module, the Generic Log Adapter (GLA).
- A fast XPath engine to assist with filtering and identifying symptomatic events.
- An event filtering and visualization module in which events are traditionally collected from a managed system and displayed to human administrators.
- A simple symptom rule module in which simple symptoms are authored and associated with visualization parameters.
- An integrated symptom visualization module that presents the symptoms by overlaying
their visualization aspects with those of normal events (which are, in turn, components of a symptom).
- A dynamic symptom avoidance module in which symptoms trends are detected and
recommendations are suggested to human administrators on ways to prevent the
symptom from ever manifesting itself -- thus avoiding the problem before it happens.
Figure 3 shows the pace in the conversion flow for the Fast XPath. The Fast XPath layer:
- Integrates the solution with existing code-generation tools.
- Extracts XML schema-specific metadata from the object it queries.
- Uses metadata available in auto-generated classes to build optimized XSL engines.
Figure 3. The place in the conversion flow for Fast XPath
Next, the article focuses on installation issues.
Installing the LTA-JD
The installation package is posted on the OPAL site. Proceed
to the download site; then:
- Select ACLT_JD_v4-2-1_Win32.exe or ACLT_JD_v2-2-1_Linux32.bin.
- Run ACLT_JD_v4-2-1 file. There is an installation guide in HTML and PDF and an InstallShield package for Windows ACLT_JD_v4-2-1_Win32.exe and for Windows ACLT_JD_v4-2-1_Linux32.bin.
The Installation Guide has information on the software and hardware prerequisites and some
jumpstart information. Remember, help is online.
To start the program simply select LTAJDStart.bat or LTAJDStart.sh from
the root directory. The very first time you start it, a configuration file
(cbeviewer.conf.xml) is created. This file is an XML document that contains customization and configuration data. You can install and run LTA-JD from a jump drive as small as 128MB.
The overall LTA-JD directory structure when installed using InstallShield wrapper looks like Figure 4:
Figure 4. The library structure
For more on the LTA-JD main folders and contents, see the LTA-JD v1.1 Install Guide. The
cbeviewr.jar is the JD main driver -- the required folder that contains the required
Common Base Event-related JAR files. Folders optional1 and optional2 contain the XPath-related JAR files. Folder optional3 holds the CEI-related JAR files after JD is installed, folder optional4 contains Generic Log Adapter (GLA) directory, and folder optional5 contains the symptom catalog related JAR files.
The overall functions of the LTA-JD
Table 1 shows a list of the major functional elements of the LTA-JD and what they do.
Table 1. The functions of the LTA-JD
| Function | Description |
|---|
| Retrieve and merge | Retrieves and merges one or more Common Base Event event sources.
Retreives and merges Common Base Events log files generated natively or by Generic Log
Adapter (GLA)
Retrieves and merges from the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) repository.
Contains Common Base Event log files and wildcard. |
|---|
| Event visualization | Provides simple visualization of Common Base Event-formatted events.
Provides a configurable display to view user-defined Common Base Event properties.
Details view of all Common Base Event properties including the Common Base Event XML format.
|
|---|
| Sort merged events | Sorts merged events on any Common Base Event properties.
Provides a multi-level sort by one or more properties and by the event source (like the log pathname). |
|---|
| Robust Filter capabilities | Filters a single or combination of Common Base Event properties.
Filters individual and/or all event sources.
Performs a simple XPath query (high performance using FastXPath).
Provides novice- and advance-user Rule Builder UIs.
|
|---|
| Configurable event highlighter | Highlights one event or a group of events based on user-defined criteria from one or more components.
Sets simple Symptom rules using XPath.
Selects different foreground/background colors for each selection.
Uses tool tips to show description of the selections.
|
|---|
| Support Symptom Catalog 2.0 | Helps you analyze selected, highlighted, or all events.
Finds single symptom descriptions for a single event.
|
|---|
| Rule Builder UIs | Comes in novice and advance.
Generates simple XPath query statements. |
|---|
| Zoom in or out of triaged events | Compresses events to only important and relevant data (highlighted events). |
|---|
| Time zone and format | Provides local time zone, formatting options, and Delta time adjustment. |
|---|
| Import/export | Facilitates collaboration, filters queries, highlighter queries, and event source names.
|
|---|
| Find function | Locates events with specific value in the event or specific property. |
|---|
| Tool tips | Provides descriptions of symptoms associated with highlighted events. |
|---|
| Save/print | Saves or prints merged, filtered, or selected events. |
|---|
| Configure viewer | Configures the viewer logging level/trace/message popup for troubleshooting. |
|---|
In conclusion
This article provides an overview of the Log and Trace Analyzer-Java Desktop and the installation and configuration
guide for the tool. Table 1 displays a list of each of the functional elements of the
LTA-JD and provides a description of what each elements does. The information in this
article gives you a working knowledge of the LTA-JD which can be built upon with the
information provided in the subsequent articles in this series.
In the next article,
go on a visual tour of the LTA-JD and learn how to:
- employ and build filters,
- use the XPath Rule Builder,
- potential events play a part in the symptoms defined by the Highlighter Rules,
- slice and dice highlighter events views,
- compose simple Symptoms rules (also called Highlighter Rules), and
- analyze and visualize events against the selected Symptom Catalogs.
Also, discover troubleshooting tips on topics such as: what resources are available,
what logging configurations to use, and how to monitor memory. In addition, gain useful
performance tips.
Resources Learn
-
"Symptomatic event visualizer: Challenges in data collection" (developerWorks, June 2007) opens the door on this series by defining the current obstacles to effective data collection and introduces the tool to help you solve them -- LTA-JD.
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The developerWorks Autonomic computing zone has a nice "library" on system events (reporting and viewing) and using the Log and Trace Analyzer:
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Get the scoop on the XPath in the W3C specification XML Path Language (XPath), Version 1.0.
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And for more on XPath and how it fits into the WS-* family of Web services standards, see the "Meet the specs" series:
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The developerWorks Autonomic computing zone has a nice "library" on the Common Base Event format:
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The developerWorks Symptoms deep dive series introduces the autonomic computing symptoms architecture and format, and details symptoms, including such information as how symptoms are represented, how to identify them, the advantages for using a standard symptom representation, and how to adopt them as part of your systems management strategy.
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Visit the developerWorks Autonomic computing zone for resources on WSDM, WEF, and cutting-edge information on other autonomic computing technologies.
-
Browse the technology bookstore for books on these and other technical topics.
Get products and technologies
Discuss
About the authors | | | Abdi Salahshour is a Senior Software Engineer, problem determination architect, Master Inventor at IBM's Autonomic Computing Technology and Development, and is currently an architect for the Plug and Manage architecture. He began working for IBM in 1982 and served in many roles -- from design and development of database diagnostic tools to system management and self-healing architecture and enablement in heterogeneous and distributed environments. He was a member of IBM Problem Determination Council, is one of the authors of the IBM Common Base Event specification, one of the principal designers and implementers of the Generic Log Adapter, and the architect and designer of the Log and Trace Analyzer for Java Desktop. |
| | | Kalpana Doraisamy is a Staff Software Engineer at IBM focusing currently on Lightweight Infrastructure for Systems Management. In her previous role she worked with the Log and Trace Analyzer for Autonomic Computing for more than two years. She was one of the senior developers of the Log and Trace Analyzer for Java Desktop. She holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, India |
| | | Ajay Rengasayee was a System Software Engineer at IBM India Software Lab, Autonomic Computing. He was a developer for Log and Trace Analyzer for Autonomic Computing and related technology for two years.He was one of the developers for Log and Trace Analyzer for Java Desktop. |
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