Managing data providers for Lifecycle Query Engine

After you install and configure Lifecycle Query Engine to index the data from the lifecycle management tools, you can check the status of each connection on the Data Providers page. You can also view and modify the properties of your data providers, reindex, or add more data providers. If you deploy Lifecycle Query Engine across several nodes, you can view detailed status for each node.

Important: Lifecycle Query Engine is the data source for reporting on projects with or without configurations; however, there are considerations. For details, see Getting started with reporting by using Lifecycle Query Engine data sources on Jazz®.net.

Important: Do this procedure when server usage is low, such as during a scheduled maintenance window.

About this task

From the Lifecycle Query Engine administration home page, at: http://<host_name>:<port>/lqe/web/admin/data-sources you can run various operations:

Procedure

To add a data provider, click Add Data Provider.
To modify the properties of a data provider, click the name of the data provider, and then edit the settings.
To validate a data provider, click name of the TRS feed in the list, and then click Validate. This task compares the TRS feed with the Lifecycle Query Engine index to ensure that the data in the index is up to date.
To reindex a data provider, click the TRS feed name in the list, and then click Reindex. Depending on the amount of data, indexing for the first time or reindexing a data provider can take a long time.
To check the status of a data provider on a particular Lifecycle Query Engine node, click the status link and select the node. If the data provider update fails, review and correct any errors. On the History tab you find statistics about the operations that ran for the data provider you focus on: initial indexing, validation, reindexing, cleanup, or removal activities.

What to do next

Sometimes indexing completes with errors. Often these are problems in the TRS feed, or they are related to network connectivity issues. If Lifecycle Query Engine encounters issues during indexing, it skips resources. These skipped resources are not the result of errors or problems with Lifecycle Query Engine; they can occur for many reasons including socket timeouts, bad resource definition from the data providers, invalid RDF from the data providers, or temporary internet outages.

When Lifecycle Query Engine cannot index a resource from a data provider, it skips that resource and generates an error in the lqe.log file. By default, Lifecycle Query Engine makes only one attempt to index each resource before skipping it. The number of times Lifecycle Query Engine must attempt to index can be increased for a specific data provider by changing the corresponding Number of retries property. Increasing the number of retries makes indexing and updates slower for that data provider. Skipped resources are normal and expected, particularly with network or connectivity issues. To determine what is causing the data provider issues, you can contact support for the affected data provider tool.

To review a list of skipped resources for a particular data provider, on the Data Providers page, click Up-to-date.
On the Data Provider Status page, click the Skipped Resources tab and review the messages to determine if the skipped resources are caused by network issues or by possible product issues.

To ensure the integrity of the TRS feed data, and to troubleshoot missing or added artifacts, you can run validation. Validating the Lifecycle Query Engine index compares the current TRS feed from a IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management application with the Lifecycle Query Engine index. Validating a TRS feed compares the current TRS feed to the data in the application repository. For more information, see Validating TRS feeds and the Lifecycle Query Engine or Link Index Provider index.

Lifecycle Query Engine automatically detects and corrects errors detected in the data published by data providers. The details of the corrections are displayed in the Corrected Errors tab on the Data Provider Status page. No further action is needed for the corrections displayed. If frequent errors occur for a data provider, contact IBM Support.

Note: You can also configure email notifications for these corrections. For more information, see Setting up email notification for Lifecycle Query Engine events.