Running the slon looper utility

The slon looper is a utility that allows Guardium to walk (loop) through your Guardium installation to gather information that can help solve customer issues. Configure and run the slon looper from the Guardium Support Information Gathering page.

About this task

The slon looper logs message dumps and MustGather information that Guardium technical support can use to help reproduce and resolve customer issues. The slon looper saves a message dump when the conditions that you specify are found in the customer's environment, such as incorrect database usernames or missing session parameters. After these conditions are satisfied, the looper saves the MustGather data alongside the message dump. Guardium technical support can replay the message dumps in IBM's secure environment to reproduce the issue. Typically, message dumps are extensive binary files. In specific scenarios, especially with firewall and query rewrite issues, the looper might log an encrypted text SLON file, as a message dump might not provide the needed insights. Work with Guardium technical support to determine how to configure the slon looper for your needs.

Procedure

  1. Browse to Manage > Maintenance > Support Information Gathering.
  2. Follow the instructions in Running must gather in the UI, and select Slon looper. Do not select any other categories.
    Looper configuration displays.
  3. Click Select to open the Select looper configuration window.
    • If one or more slon looper configurations are available, select a looper and click Save.
    • If you do not have an existing configuration, click New to open the New looper configuration window. For more information about configuring an slon looper, see Configuring the slon looper utility.
  4. After you select an slon looper configuration, click Start to begin running the slon looper.

Results

To view the results, browse to Manage > Maintenance > Support Information Results. You can open or save the .tgz file.

What to do next

If you need detailed login information to solve your issue, Guardium technical support might suggest that you configure and run the Login information dump session level policy. For more information, see Session-level policies and Login information dump example.