IBM® Control Center 6.0 Release Notes

Content

Release Notes contain last-minute changes and other important product information. Read this document before installing and upgrading to IBM® Control Center.

This document describes the V6.0 release.


System requirements

System requirements changed significantly after Sterling Control Center version 5.3. If you are upgrading from version 5.3 or prior, use the system estimation tools in Determining engine and database requirements prior to upgrading. For information about configuring databases for use by IBM® Control Center, see Overview of IBM Control Center databases. For more information about hardware and software compatibility for IBM® Control Center, see Detailed system requirements.

Important: Support for the HP-UX platform was removed from IBM Control Center V6.0.
The latest iFix for V6.0 is V6.0.0.1, which you can obtain from Fix Central. Download any product updates from IBM Passport Advantage® and subsequent maintenance updates from Fix Central.

Some IBM® Control Center functionality applies only to specific server types. See Functionality by server type in this document.

See Determining engine and database requirements for information about determining configurations for the IBM® Control Center engine.

Attention: The name for the SQLJDBC driver JAR files are the same as they were in the prior release of IBM Control Center. When IBM Control Center uses MSSQL, it requires a copy of the SQLJDBC 4.0 driver or above. SQLJDBC 4.0 contains two JAR files. Use the JAR file named sqljdbc4.jar. See System Requirements for the JDBC Driver.


Required operating system patches

IBM® Control Center uses Cognos Business Intelligence V10.2.1.4 as the reporting engine. Install required operating system patches for Cognos Business Intelligence before you install IBM® Control Center. Required patches can be found at Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2.1.4.

Important: Check the Cognos Business Intelligence web site for required libraries. In addition to those listed, the following libraries are also required in a UNIX environment: libstdc++.so.6, libX11.so.6, libXau.so.6, and libXdmcp.so.6. Contact your UNIX system administrator.

Mobile application

IBM® Sterling Control Center Mobile 1.1 was removed from the Apple App Store on 08/12/2015 and is no longer available for download. If you already have a copy of the mobile application, you can continue to use it with IBM® Control Center V6.0 and earlier. To submit a request for a mobile app with specific features or on a specific platform, please enter a Request for Enhancement.


APAR fixes

For information about fixes for IBM® Control Center, see Fix Central.


Contacting IBM Software Support

If you encounter a problem with this product that cannot be resolved using the information outlined in the documentation, contact IBM® Software Support. See Contacting IBM Software Support.


Migrate data from MySQL databases

IBM® Control Center V6.0 and later does not support MySQL as a database type. You must migrate your MySQL database to one of the databases supported by IBM® Control Center: DB2, Oracle, SQL Server 2008, or SQL Server 2012. See Migrating data from MySQL databases.

Migrate existing EVENTS data to Sterling B2B Integrator tables

During the upgrade process for Sterling Control Center releases prior to V5.4.2, IBM® Control Center creates tables to capture Sterling B2B Integrator activity. If you have data that was collected from Sterling B2B Integrator prior to upgrading to IBM® Control Center V6.0 and you are upgrading from a Sterling Control Center release prior to V5.4.2, run the convertB2BData utility to migrate your existing data to the Sterling B2B Integrator tables. This utility migrates data previously stored in the EVENTS table to where it is stored now in the following tables: Sterling File Gateway activity (FG_STATS_LOG), protocol activity (AF_STATS_LOG), and business process activity (BP_STATS_LOG).

Important: Run the migration utility after you upgrade IBM® Control Center, while the engine is stopped. Do not run Sterling B2B Integrator or Sterling File Gateway reports for data that was collected before the upgrade until you have migrated your data. Depending on the volume of your data, the migration utility can take several hours to complete the migration process. It is recommended that you run the migration utility on a test or development environment before you run it with production data. See Migrating EVENTS table data to Sterling B2B Integrator activity tables .

General considerations

IBM® Control Center has the following general considerations:

• The typical time to install and configure IBM® Control Center V6.0 is one hour or less.
• IBM® Control Center can run in a virtual machine environment provided that enough resources (memory, processing power, and storage) are allocated to the virtual machine.
• If the console loses connectivity to the engine, it attempts to reconnect to the engine every 30 seconds until it reconnects, or until you exit the console.
• If you are upgrading the engine and have not stopped and restarted the browser, or refreshed the browser, confirm that the IBM® Control Center engine is included in the browser list of trusted sites.
• The version of Sterling Connect:Direct Browser User Interface that is embedded within Sterling Control Center uses the same keystore and truststore files as Sterling Control Center. If you want to use a different keystore and truststore file, use the stand-alone version of Sterling Connect:Direct Browser User Interface.
• If you do not enable the globalization parameter for the Microsoft SQL server during an IBM Control Center installation, then you cannot use multi-byte characters. When a multi-byte character is used without enabling this parameter, IBM Control Center cannot run, and you must manually remove the character from your database. If you choose to enable the globalization parameter at a later time, then you must reinstall IBM Control Center.

Tuning the engine for data visibility groups

When you use data visibility groups (DVGs), the IBM® Control Center engine keeps separate active alerts, handled alerts, and completed processes caches for each DVG that is defined. To optimize overall engine performance for DVG usage, consider tuning the engine. See Tuning the engine for data visibility groups.

Known limitations

IBM® Control Center has the following limitations:

• IBM Control Center 6.0 does not support validating the Init Parm options that are introduced with IBM Sterling Connect Direct V5.3.
• The Report Studio feature of Cognos Business Intelligence V10.2.1.4 that is integrated with IBM® Control Center V6.0 does not work with Internet Explorer 9 with HTTPS. You can run reports and see the output in the Cognos Viewer, but you cannot open the report in Report Studio. This limitation is due to a bug in Cognos Business Intelligence V10.2.1.4. Report Studio in IBM® Control Center V6.0 does work with FireFox HTTP, FireFox HTTPS, and Internet Explorer 10 and 11.
• In Internet Explorer 10, the frame line does not display correctly in the Active Alerts, Current Activity, Environmental Health, and Quality Scorecard widgets when you are saving or printing a snapshot. To correct this issue:

1. From the Tools menu, click Internet Options.

2. Click Reset to reset the Internet Explorer settings.

3. Click the Advanced tab.

4. In the Settings list, in Advanced Graphics settings, select the Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering check box.

• IBM® Control Center cannot monitor Sterling B2B Integrator servers using IPv6. You must specify an IPv4 address or a DNS name for the connection.
• The context-sensitive Help in the IBM® Control Center Console provides definitions for new fields added with this release. However, some Console fields do not have context-sensitive Help. To access the complete product documentation, click the Console Help button, which goes to IBM Control Center in IBM Knowledge Center.
• If you open a Cognos report in the Excel 2002 Format by using a later version of Excel, you can get a warning that the file format does not match the file extension. When asked if you still want to open the file, click “Yes” to continue viewing your report. The document is not impacted by the warning.
• While viewing or downloading a Cognos report, if you select View in Excel Options > View in CSV Format, the file that is downloaded shows an .xls extension instead of .csv.
  See Modify Properties for the CSV Output Format for information that explains how to change the CSV properties.
  
• For a web console session, if you change the sort options by clicking the column headers, sorting is not persisted if you leave that page by going to another page and then returning. To resolve this issue, click on the column header to re-sort.

• When you access the web console, you might notice that portions of the UI are not visible in high contrast mode, to avoid this issue, do not use high contrast mode.

• In viewing the Completed Files Transfers list, the wheel on the mouse does not scroll the list in the locked column areas. To resolve this issue, move the mouse to the right side (unlocked column area) and use the mouse wheel to scroll the list.
• When you update an email address in the configCC utility, the system wide administrator email address will not be updated automatically. To resolve this issue, use the IBM Control Center console or web console to access the existing actions that are configured for email notification and manually change the email address.

• When you click Monitor > Completed Processes and press Ctrl + - and Ctrl + + to change the resolution ratio, sometimes some columns may not display the alignment after you change the ratio multiple times. You can resolve this issue by either reverting back to the original resolution or manually resizing the column width or clicking the Refresh button.

• Using Server Groups in data visibility group (DVG) criteria is problematic. DVG criteria that specify server groups do not match events that are produced by servers in those server groups. As a result, events that should trigger those DVG rules and SLCs do not trigger them. Users who are limited to the data that matches those DVGs see nothing. You can resolve this issue by changing all DVG definitions that contain server groups in their criteria to specify each individual server in those server groups. Alternatively, a role can be defined that is restricted by a server group, without using a DVG.
• Daylight Saving Time rules for Brazil are not correct for 2009 and beyond. The fix for SR 1367170 addresses this problem by allowing the user to add or update time zone definitions. See Changing engine settings after installation for help configuring time zone definitions.
• At peak volume, the number of events processed per second may decrease, which can be caused by an additional database operation during event processing.
• IBM® Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX V4.2.0.2 has configuration parameters not supported by IBM® Control Center 6.0.
  Some new initialization and netmap parameters, including ones related to FASP, were introduced in Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX V4.2.0.2. Some or all parameters can be seen while doing configuration management of Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX V4.2.0.2 servers in IBM® Control Center, but you cannot modify all the values you are able to see.
  There are two new parameters in initparm.cfg for Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX V4.2.0.2 that you cannot modify:
  
  ckpt.max.age=
  
  fasp:\
  :listen.ports=
  
  IBM® Control Center will give an error message on both of these parameters if you click on them in Full Text View Tab of Initialization Parameters Details.
  In netmaps and initparms for Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX 4.2.0.2., there are new parameters that IBM® Control Center will not allow users to update or view:
  
  Local Node:\
  :fasp=
  :fasp.filesize.threshold=
  :fasp.bandwidth=
  :fasp.policy=
  
  Remote Nodes:\
  :fasp=
  :fasp.filesize.threshold=
  :fasp.bandwidth=
  :fasp.policy=
• You might get an error when saving changes made to the workspace. This error happens if you run reports from the web console or console before you save changes to the workspace. Also, this issue occurs when the host name is a fully qualified host name rather than an IP address.

Important: The fix for this issue is available in IBM Control Center 6.0 Fix Pack 1.

To resolve this issue for the current browser session:

1. Clear the browser cookies.
2. Log in to the web console.
3. Access the workspace and save it.
You can run reports and save the workspace for the current browser session.

To resolve this issue permanently:

1. Locate the IBM Control Center installation directory/ Cognos/configuration/coglocale.xml file.
2. Locate the "cookieDomain" xml element and add the fully qualified host name as its value.

<parameter name="cookieDomain">
     <value type="xsd:string"/>
</parameter>

or
<crn:parameter
 xmlns:crn="http://developer.cognos.com/schemas/crconfig/1/"
name="cookieDomain">
     <crn:value xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:type="xsd:string"></crn:value>
</crn:parameter>

3. And add the full name of your host for value, for example:

<parameter name="cookieDomain">
    <value
type="xsd:string">hostname.irv.ustx.ibm.com</value>
</parameter>

or

<crn:parameter
 xmlns:crn="http://developer.cognos.com/schemas/crconfig/1/" name="cookieDomain">
     <crn:value xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:type="xsd:string">hostname.irv.ustx.ibm.com</crn:value>
</crn:parameter>

4. Run the configCC utility and restart the IBM Control Center engine.

• The following issues are caused by Gridx limitations:
• When you select Monitor > Completed Processes and refresh the page, the following message displays: "No items to display.” This message may display when the data is being loaded from the server side.
• When you click Monitor > Completed Processes (Active Alerts/ Handled Alerts/ Queued Processes) and change the resolution ratio from 1024 x 768 to a higher one, a grey box may display in the left corner of your screen.

Functionality by server type

The following table lists IBM Control Center functionality broken down by server type:

Sterling Connect:Direct Platform and Release	Base Functionality	High Watermark Report	Process goes to Hold Queue	Process Interrupted Events	Push Licenses	Resolved Missing and Omitted Statistics
Sterling Connect:Direct for HP NonStop version 3.5	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for HP NonStop version 3.6	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for OpenVMS version 3.5	No	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for OpenVMS version 3.6	No	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS version 5.0	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS version 5.1	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS version 5.2	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for i5/OS™ version 3.6	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for i5/OS version 3.7	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX version 4.0	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX version 4.1	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows version 4.5	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows version 4.6	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Enterprise for UNIX version 2.4	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Enterprise for UNIX version 2.5	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Enterprise for z/OS version 1.4	No	Yes	No	No	No	N/A
Sterling Connect:Enterprise for z/OS version 1.5	No	Yes	No	No	No	N/A
Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.0	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	N/A
Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.1	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	N/A
Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.2	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	N/A