Configuring integration tracing

Once the Operations Dashboard operator is deployed, perform the following steps to verify the deployment, configure important settings, and register capabilities in order to start collecting tracing data and use the Operations Dashboard.

Replacing certificates

For information about replacing certificates, see Replacing certificates.

Verify the deployment

  • Access the Web Console.

  • The license agreement page should be displayed. Once you confirm the agreement, you should have access to the Web Console.

  • See to Internal health and make sure there are no internal alerts.

Important settings

IBM recommends that you configure the following settings:

  • If you purchased a license of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard Add-on, see Product activation to upload the activation key that removes basic entitlement limitations (see Basic entitlement limitations).
  • By default, only ten percent (10%) of the traces is sampled. To change this value (for example, to increase it to 100% so all traces are sampled), see Sampling policy.

  • In order to allow Operations Dashboard to send emails (for reports, alerts, share, etc.), see SMTP system parameters to configure an SMTP connection.

  • In order to allow Operations Dashboard to send Syslog records for alerting, navigate to Reports & alerts system parameters page to configure the Syslog destination server.

Capability registration

Integration tracing receives distributed tracing data from registered IBM Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities. When a new capability is deployed with IBM Cloud Pak Platform UI, it must register with Operations Dashboard in order to be able to send distributed tracing data. For more information, see Capability registration.

Expanding tracing data storage

After Operations Dashboard is installed, it is possible to expand the tracing data storage in order to increase the amount of historical data to persist in the Store.

Restriction: Expanding the tracing data storage is applicable and possible only if basic entitlement limitations have been removed by uploading an activation key.

Option 1 - Increase replicas of store data nodes (recommended)

You can increase the number of replicas of Operations Dashboard store data nodes by changing the replicas value in the appropriate OperationsDashboard custom resource. This creates new data nodes with more storage, and increases the total storage capacity.

Option 2 - Increase the claim size

In order to expand the PVC (Persistent Volume Claim), perform the following steps for each Operations Dashboard Store data pod:

  1. Make sure the provisioner supports resizing PVCs. To find out whether your storage class may be resized, see Resizing Persistent Volumes using Kubernetes.

  2. Follow the procedure in Expanding persistent volume claims (PVCs) with a file system. To locate the Store PVC name, change <OD_NAMESPACE> in the following command to the namespace where Operations Dashboard is installed in your environment and execute it:

    oc get pvc -n <OD_NAMESPACE> | grep -e "-od-str-"

    This returns a list of one or more PVC names (depends on the amount of replicas for the Store data component). The PVC name is in the following format:

    pvc-<OD_INSTANCE_NAME>-ibm-integration-od-str-x
  3. After the PVC expansion is complete for each of the PVCs in the list, the Store pods need to be restarted so the expansion can take effect. To restart the Store pods, change <OD_NAMESPACE> in the following command to the namespace where Operations Dashboard is installed in your environment and execute it:

    oc delete sts -n <OD_NAMESPACE> <OD_INSTANCE_NAME>-ibm-integration-od-str

    You can also get the instance name of Operations Dashboard that created the PVC by running the command on the PVC name obtained earlier:

    oc describe pvc <PVC_NAME>

    The instance name appears on the annotation app.kubernetes.io/instance.