Introduction

The Technical Support Appliance (TSA) is an easy-to-use tool that you can use to get more value from your IBM® Support contracts. TSA discovers key information technology elements and their relationships within your IT infrastructure, and then securely transmits the data to IBM Support Insights for analysis. This data provides insight into the complex relationships between the applications, middleware, servers, and network components in your data center.

TSA includes a web-based user interface (UI) to set up and customize access to your system and data. You can also use the UI to modify schedules for data discovery and transmission.

As part of the discovery process, TSA initially attempts to detect endpoints within the defined scope without using discovery credentials. It involves the use of Nmap and attempts to discover and classify devices with minimum intrusive IP scanning, stack fingerprinting, and port mapping. Generally, this activity is not significant enough to set off an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), but might do so if it has stringent local settings.

Use the General scope sets to discover individual IT network elements. The scope set contains one or more scopes that identify the location of the network elements by using an IP address or host name, a range of IP addresses, or a network or subnet.

For HMCs and VMware vCenter Server® or VMware vSphere™ ESXi®, use dynamic scope sets. Dynamic scope sets require far less configuration effort in TSA versus creating and managing discovery scopes for individual LPARs or virtual machines. Also, for environments where the LPARs or virtual machines are added and deleted over time, dynamic scope sets can handle it without the need to modify any scope sets.