Considerations for upgrading IBM Control Center Monitor to V6.4.0

Before you upgrade your instance of IBM® Control Center Monitor to V6.4.0, there are some items that you need to consider. These considerations are to alert you about information or tasks to complete before you upgrade.

With the V6.3 of IBM Control Center Monitor, you can enable a high availability environment that supports the installation of more than one event processor (EP), Jetty Web Application Server. The following bullets are items that you need to consider before you upgrade your IBM Control Center Monitor instance to V6.4.0:
  • When upgrading to 6.4.0 for the first time from any pre-6.4.0 release, the initial upgrade cannot be a rolling upgrade. You must bring down all EPs and upgrade each EP to 6.4.0 before starting any of the EPs again. All EPs must be in sync for the initial upgrade to 6.4.0, before being started. After the initial upgrade to 6.4.0, you may resume with rolling upgrades (example, 6.4.0.0 to 6.4.0.0 iFix01), where one EP is brought down at a time, upgraded, then restarted.
  • When you upgrade and configure your EPs, ensure that all EPs have the same configuration for enabling events to the JMS queue.
  • From IBM Control Center Monitor V6.2, Cognos has been replaced with Jasper Reports Library. Make sure you have migrated to standalone Cognos, if you want to continue using Cognos for generating reports, creating workspaces and using widgets.
  • If you use WS_FTP, Sterling Connect:Enterprise® for z/OS®, FTP for z/OS, or Sterling Connect:Direct® File Agent that send traps to IBM Control Center Monitor, then in a high availability environment, you need to configure WS_FTP, Sterling Connect:Enterprise for z/OS, and FTP for z/OS to send traps to the EP they are assigned to. Any Sterling Connect:Direct File Agent must send traps to the controller event processor. If the controller event processor fails, you must reconfigure the SNMP host to send traps to the new controller event processor. You lose traps if you do not complete this reconfiguration.

    The alternative is to configure these SNMP hosts to send their traps to all EPs, or to configure an external trap forwarder and have them send all their traps to it, and to have it send all the traps it receives to all EPs.

  • From V6.1, you can use a load balancer in a high availability environment. Configuring a load balancer evenly distributes your web console sessions, or events of a dynamically discovered server that are posted to the IBM Control Center Monitor event repository. For more information, see Load balancer configuration for IBM Control Center.
  • If you are running at 80 percent or more CPU capacity with IBM Control Center Monitor V6.0, from V6.1 onward you need to add more CPU. Adding more CPUs is necessary to properly scale an IBM Control Center Monitor environment with multiple EPs. For more information, see Detailed System Requirements.
  • If you are running IBM Control Center Monitor with many DVGs configured, you can experience a downgrade in IBM Control Center Monitor performance. To improve the performance, you can either disable some of the DVGs or add more CPUs.
  • When you upgrade from a previous version of IBM Control Center Monitor to V6.1 or later version, the process per second can decrease with the total volume of events increased which can cause a decrease in performance. There are new engine.properties properties that can improve the performance and the process migration. For more information, see Performance and Tuning.
  • Make sure that the IBM Control Center Monitor installation directory contains less than 50 exported configuration folders. If there are more then 50 exported configuration folders in the Control_Center_Installation/conf-exported directory, when you upgrade your IBM Control Center Monitor instance or run the exportConfig.sh script, your instance or script hangs.

  • If you have an existing DB2 database that is used with IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor v6.0 and to upgrade to IBM Control Center Monitor 6.2 or later, then you need to run the ALTER TABLESPACE TS_REG16_@DBNAME@ PREFETCHSIZE AUTOMATIC and ALTER BUFFERPOOL @DBNAME@_04KP IMMEDIATE SIZE AUTOMATIC statements.

  • You can upgrade from latest fix level of Control Center 6.1.3 to Control Center 6.4. From Control Center 6.2 onwards, Cognos has been removed and it has been replaced with Jasper Reports Library. If you need to continue to use Cognos, you need to migrate your Cognos artifacts to your own standalone Cognos instance. To migrate custom Cognos artifacts that exist in Control Center 6.1.3, you must first upgrade to latest version of Control Center 6.1.3 which has the scripts to export Cognos artifacts. For more detailed information, see Migrating to standalone Cognos.