IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager Solution: Using ITCAM to Monitor In-House website Solutions Author: Larry McWilliams, IBM Tivoli Integration of Competency Document Version 2, Update: 2012-01-30 1
Note: Before using this information and the product it supports, read the information in Notices. Copyright International Business Machines Corporation 2012. US Government Users Restricted Rights Use, duplication or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract with IBM Corporation 2
Introduction IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) offers several solutions. Robotic Response Time (RRT) is one of these solutions and can be used in multiple ways. One primary way of using this product is to monitor your in-house solutions for Response Time and Availability issues. Typically, you want to see a significant amount of Availability (green indicators) and quick Response Times for your applications, but when issues come up, you want to be able to see the issue or have an event/situation produced to notify someone of the pending problem. The following products are used to monitor the live in-house website solutions as explained in this paper: IBM Tivoli Monitoring ITCAM for Robotic Response Time (Rational Performance Tester V8.0 for playbacks) At the in-house website, there are several URLs that we wanted to monitor to make sure that if they went offline or if response times got too slow, we had a quick way to view those issues and report them to the right person in our organization. The solutions that we wanted to monitor were as follows: democentral: democentral is a solution where our customers can gain access to information about demonstrations to our product offerings along with other useful tools, such as blogs and communities. RTC (TADDM): Rational Team Concert is a Rational tool used to track projects/tasks within our organization/teams. icoc Cloud icoc Cloud is our Integration Center of Competency wiki page where we post info about our Dark Matter (test) environment, for example, findings, defects/pmrs, and so on. DayTrader (Financial): DayTrader, is a tool that is available to the public for testing and learning WebSphere J2EE applications. SOA Workbench (Insurance): custom application. GetCustomer (Retail): SOA Workbench and GetCustomer are two in-house applications that are used for testing SOA. Get Customer can also be used to test ITCAM for Application Diagnostics and ITCAM for Transaction Tracking. 3
The environment: To monitor your solutions, you must first install IBM Tivoli Monitoring. Figure 1 shows a basic diagram of the environment for the solution documented in this paper. Figure 1. Basic environment The next procedure is to install the ITCAM agents, such as RRT, and then configure them so they are displayed in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Configuration of the agents is not described in this paper, but Figure 2 shows an example of both Robotic Response Time and Web Response Time in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal after they are correctly configured. Figure 2. Robotic Response Time and Web Response Time displayed in the portal 4
Installation steps To Install ITCAM, you follow the installation steps in the Installation Guides for the ITCAM applications. Using ITCAM for Transactions Response Time agents as an example, you select the components that you want to install and click Next to continue with the installation as shown in Figure 3. You also want to install support for the selected components on your Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server, Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server, and Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Important: Do not forget to install the ITCAM Console. You can only have one of these in your environment, but it is an important component when using ITCAM for Response Time components, ITCAM for Transactions, and ITCAM for Application Diagnostics. Figure 3. InstallShield window for ITCAM for Transacation Response Time Agents If you are installing several of the ITCAM products, the installation order can make a difference because some products are prerequisites for others. The following installation order is recommended: 1. ITCAM Support on the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server, Tivoli Enterprise Portal 2. 3. 4. Server, and Tivoli Enterprise Portal clients. ITCAM Console. ITCAM for Transactions. ITCAM for Application Diagnostics: Dependent on Transactions if integration between the two is required). 5
5. Install your playback tools on a computer where you want to maintain your Playback 6. script repository such as Rational Robot, Rational Functional Tester, or Rational Performance Tester. Generally, this computer must not be one on which your agent resides. Rational Robot is the only exception. See the installation documentation for additional information. Response Time agents can be installed. They can also be installed along with the ITCAM Console. Configuring the agent Do the following steps to configure the agent: 1. Complete the ITCAM for Robotic Response Time configuration window to configure the agent to report to the proper Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server or Remote Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server. 6
2. Make the necessary configuration changes. The defaults handle most environments as shown in the following screen capture. 3. Start up your agent or agents, if there are multiple agents on one computer. 7
Setting up a playback script Now that the agents are configured, you can record a playback script to put some load against the application and start seeing data in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal workspaces. You can do this in several ways. You can use Rational Robot, Rational Functional Tester or Rational Performance Tester. In the example, you see how we recorded a script against our DayTrader application using Rational Performance Tester. Note that Rational Robot and Rational Performance Tester are included in your installation media. The steps for using Rational Robot and Rational Functional Tester are different. See the Transactions User Guide for more information. Do the following basic steps to use Rational Performance Tester: 1. Start Rational Performance Tester. 2. Select your workspace. 3. Click Create a Test from Recording. 8
4. Click Create Test from New Recording. 5. Select RPT HTTP Recording. 9
6. In the Test file name field, enter a recording, for example, Trade_Recording.testsuite. 7. Click Finish. The RPT initializes for recording. 10
Your default browser opens and you are ready to record. 8. Follow the Remove Temporary Files instructions on the page. 9. Enter the web address that you want to use. In this example, it is the address for our DayTrader application. 11
10. To stop the recording, close the browser window. You see a prompt to open the editor. 11. Click Yes. 12. Select the check box for any verification points that you want, for example, Check Page Title as shown in the following screen capture. 13. Click in the lower half of the ITCAM Test Navigator and select your script, for example, Test_Recording. 12
14. Select the Run Trade recording button, as shown in the next screen capture, to test that your script runs and that there are no errors. 15. If you see one or both of the following prompts, click Yes for both of them. 13
If everything runs successfully, you see something like the following screen capture. 14
You must now upload the script that you just recorded to the computer on which you installed the ITCAM Console. To upload the script do the following steps: 1. Click File > Export. 15
2. Select ITCAM for Transactions and click Next. 16
3. In the Host field, enter the host name on which your ITCAM Console is located and click Next. 17
4. Select the check box for your RPT project name and click Next. 5. Select the recording that you just recorded. You can select more than one. 6. Optional: You can change the application name or leave the name as is. 7. To export the recording to the ITCAM Console, click Finish. 18
For each recording that you uploaded, a message is displayed indicating the successful upload. 19
Scheduling the Playback To this point, you created a playback recording and uploaded it to the ITCAM Console. You must now schedule it to run and then distribute the schedule and recording to one or multiple agents for playback. You do this using the ITCAM Console in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Before you do that, you must verify that the script is on the Console. Do the following steps to verify that the script is on the Console: 1. Using the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, navigate to your ITCAM Console. 2. Expand Application Management Console and click Robotic Scripts. In the Robotic Scripts window you see the script, in this example, Trade_Recording.zip. This verifies that the script was properly uploaded. You can now do the following steps to schedule your script for playback: 1. Using the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, click the Application Manager Configuration Editor button. 20
When the Editor first opens, you see the Applications view. 2. In the navigation pane, select Profiles and expand Robotic Response Time as shown in the following screen capture. 3. You can do one of the following steps: Select an existing profile, for example, ETrading. Create a new profile. The process for scheduling your new script for playback is the same, whether you select a profile or create a new one. 4. For this example, select New Profile. 21
5. In the fields, enter a name and, optionally, a description. 6. The type is Robotic Response Time. 7. Click OK. 8. In the upper-right pane of the Configuration window, click the Transactions tab. 22
9. Click the Add button and select the recording that you want, for example, Trade_Recording 10. Click OK. 11. In the upper-right pane, click the recording. Important: In the lower-right pane you have the following options: Script interval: Use this option to set how often the script is scheduled for playback Min response time threshold: Use this option to set a threshold. When the playback exceeds the threshold, a Situation event is produced. 23
1. Click the Distribution tab and select the agent that you want the playback to occur on. To select one or more robotic agents, select items from the Available Managed Systems list. Click the left arrow button (<) to move them to the Assigned list. To distribute the playback recording to all of the available agents, select *EM_ROBOT. Your administrator can create additional groups, for example, Regional or Division as selections for your use. 2. Click OK. 24
3. Repeat these steps for each recording that you create for each application you want to monitor., 25
Monitoring your Results You ve recorded a script using RPT, uploaded it, scheduled it to run, distributed the script and distributed it to a Managed System. You can now monitor your results. To do this, you again use the Tivoli Enterprise Portal and navigate to the agent on which you scheduled the playback to occur. Figure 2 shows your results for the applications that were mentioned at the beginning of this paper. You can see that your application availability (green) is currently good. Note that the Percent Available column displays 100% for all applications. However, based on the Historical Summary workspace, you can see that some threshold violations (yellow color) and some outages (red color) are reported. You can determine what time of day these issues occurred. Click HTTPdaytrader and select Application Details to get a more accurate representation of Availability and Response Times over time (the prior 8 hrs). Figure 2. Application results: Historical summary and status details If you position your cursor over one of the red bars (percent failed) in the Application Availability Trend workspace, hover help displays when the outage occurred and the percentage, for example, 100%, 50%, and so on. You can do the same thing in the Response Time Breakdown workspace to see the overall time, client time, and more. You can also see that when the 26
availability bar is the color red, your response times spike as well. At this point you would open a ticket or call a support person to find out why the outages occurred. Figure 3. Application availability trend and Response time breakdowns 27
Other Monitoring Views Another useful view is the Playback Status view, which shows the status of the playback scripts on the agent. In Figure 4 you can see that all of your scripts are running to completion as of their last run. Figure 4. Script execution trend and playback status 28
You can also view the status of the HTTPdaytrader application from the Application Management Console. You can right-click the Application, the Transaction (as shown in Figure 5) or the Client and see some of the same information for the agent, transaction, and so on that is also shown in Figure 4. Figure 5. Application details: Viewing the status of the application Architecture: Computer OS riker RedHat 5.2 troi RedHat 5.2 crusher RedHat 5.2 x86ondemand03 W2K3 R2 x86ondemand51 x330a30s20 W2K3 R2 W2K3 R2 Product - Version IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.2 Fix Pack 1 Tivoli Enterprise Portals IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.2 Fix Pack 1 Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.2 Fix Pack 1 Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server for RedHat ITCAM for Transaction Tracking 7.2 Application Management Console (t3) ITCAM for Transaction Tracking 7.2 Robotic Agent (t6) Rational Performance Tester v8.0 29
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