Using Managing Server to generate Reports in ITCAM.

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Your ITCAM server has been doing a good job of monitoring your WebSphere or J2EE (WebLogic / JBoss / Tomcat) servers.   You now want to get some Reports showing the monitored data.   You basically have two types of Reports:  Application Reports and Server Resource/Capacity-type Reports under the Performance Analysis menu of the Managing Server.  Some tips to keep in mind before using these Reporting menus:

Increase Monitoring Level / Sampling Rate to get more data:

To get some good amount of Reporting data, you will first need to populate the tables in the Octigate database.  If there's no data in the Octigate database, then there's nothing to report on.  So go to your Monitoring on Demand page on the MS, and change the Monitoring Level and Sampling Rate to a higher level.  You have to be cautious in doing this as the higher the Sampling Rate, more records are inserted into the tables.   Also, if you increase the Monitoring MOD Level to L2 or L3, this will cause Performance impacts to the monitored server.  So, you should increase it in Steps, say from MOD Level L1 / Sampling Rate 2% to MOD Level L2 / Sampling Rate 10% to MOD Level L2 / Sampling Rate 20% and so on and observe performance impacts over time.  After your Reports, you should bring the MOD Level / Sampling Rate back to defaults or to what it was before.   There's also a Scheduling option in the Monitoring On Demand page so you can schedule this if you wish. 

Choose the right time frame:

When pulling a Report, the End Date time field defaults to "00:00" and this is midnight.  So.. if pulling a Report, choose the End Date carefully.  You can use one of the pre-defined Preset options in the pull-down menu for commonly used time-frames.

Choose the right Server / Group:

All the reports depend on the right Server / Group.  So if you are looking for data related to a specific Server (for example an Application running on a particular Server), then you need to pick the right Server at the start of the Report.  If you are not sure which Server it is, then you can select the Group, and work from there.  Once you've identified the Server, you can narrow it down to the Server within that Group.

Use datatrim.sh pruning script periodically:

After you create your Reports, you have the option to save/email them.  Once you have your Reports, you may want to run the datatrim.sh later on to clean up the database for faster performance.  Using the datatrim.sh script periodically to trim data from the database will increase performance and maintain database integrity.  Frequency of running your datatrim.sh script depends on the amount of data to be trimmed, the number of records you have in your tables, how long you want to store the data, etc..

If you still don't get data:

After you have checked the above, and you still don't see data..  then you can do these trivial tasks:

•  check if you have data in the tables, connect to the Octigate database and do a SELECT statement on the relevant tables
•  check the MS logs under the (default) /var/ibm/tivoli/common/CYN/logs (Unix/Linux) or C:\Progra~1\tivoli\common\CYN\logs (Win) directories for any SQL errors
•  if you are seeing deadlock issues in the logs, then you may have to run your Report at night when the tables may not be used (or Schedule it to run at night)

If all else fails, simply open a new pmr with IBM Support and we'll be glad to look into this.

Good luck.  :-)

Noel Lewis

ITCAM / APM / ICAM L2 Support team

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