Monitoring with the Call Home feature

The Cloud Pak for Data System includes Call Home capabilities which can be configured and enabled at your direction (preferably as part of the initial system installation). Call Home supports both creation of service requests for specific errors and events as well as the regular reporting of status and system health.

Both problem and status reporting are done through a secure socket interface (HTTPS) which uses the same encrypted data transfer mechanism widely used for Internet commerce. Problem reporting will occur for predefined events (issues) which will result in a support case being automatically opened for this specific system. The case will be automatically routed to our support analysts, and will automatically include a problem description, the overall state of the system and the first pass collection of diagnostic data collected for this type of event or failure. This gives our service analysts a head-start on your issue; so that before they have contacted you, they may have already identified root cause and a plan of action.

Status reporting expands our support capabilities by regularly sending health and operating status of your system back to IBM (again over the same secure transport mechanism). These regular reports provide a baseline of your system health and behavior. This way, when you do experience a problem, our support team has a history of system health and usage, to more effective help diagnose root cause with minimal involvement from your team. In the future, we will use this data to more pro-actively help you manage your system and avoid costly outages or performance degradation.

Most of the configuration of the Call Home feature is accomplished by the IBM installation team; with the exception of external firewall connectivity.

You can also change some Call Home settings by using the callhome_config.py interactive script.

In addition to the configuration via the callhome_config.py script, the mail server (SMTP configuration) and the default notification email recipient must be configured in order for Alert Notification and Call Home to work.