Ellipse Support
Ellipse Support Contents Ellipse Support 2 Commercial In Confidence 3 Preface 4 Mission 5 Scope 5 Introduction 6 What do you need to know about tuning and configuration? 6 How does a customer help with diagnosis of issues? 6 Tell me about Administering Ellipse? 6 Azure Cloud (PaaS) 7 Operations and monitoring of the Azure resources 7 Operations 7 Monitoring 7 Support 8 Reproduce error 8 Collect screenshots 9 Gathering Diagnostics 9 Virtual Appliance (IaaS) 11 Operations and monitoring of the Virtual Appliance 11 Support 11 Appliance 12 Diagnostics 12 Reproduce error 12 Collect screenshots 12 Save kickstart logs 12 Outage and Fix Scenarios 12 Outage and fix Scenarios 13
Commercial In Confidence Copyright 2018 ABB All Rights Reserved Confidential and Proprietary Legal Disclaimer The product described in this documentation may be connected to, and/or communicate information and data via, a network interface, which should be connected to a secure network. It is your sole responsibility to ensure a secure connection to the network and to establish and maintain appropriate measures (such as but not limited to the installation of firewalls, application of authentication measures, encryption of data, installation of antivirus programs, etc.) to protect the product, the network, your systems, and the interface against any kind of security breach, unauthorised access, interference, intrusion, leakage, damage, or corruption or theft of data. We are not liable for damages or losses related to any such security breach, unauthorised access, interference, intrusion, leakage, damage, or corruption or theft of data.
Preface This guide is part of the Ellipse Architecture set of documents. It is intended for planners, project managers, and technical staff. Figure: Ellipse Architectural Documents view Explanation of the documents within the diagram 1. Provides a high level understanding behind the Ellipse Architecture, the product capability, an outline of the Ellipse Lifecycle, the underlying technology supporting it, key benefits of the different styles of deployment along with a high level understanding behind these deployment options. 2. Contains the sizing for each of the Ellipse Deployment options. 3. Contains an overview of the security approach and management of Ellipse. 4. Contains information related to Ellipse Disaster Recovery for the different deployment options. 5. Provides the information on Licence Auditing. 6. Provides the Azure Cloud (PaaS) deployment information along with any relevant Cloud install and ongoing operations related details. 7. Provides the Virtual Appliance deployment (IaaS) information.
8. Provides the Appliance deployment information. Appliance refers to the physical server configuration upon which Ellipse is deployed. a. Implementation refers to the Appliance implementation documents b. Operations refers to the Appliance operations related documents including geospatial. 9. Introduces information around Ellipse support. 10. Introduces the various applications that Ellipse integrates to and refers to further documentation as appropriate. 11. Customisation refers to the customisation documents that are equally valid for all Ellipse deployment types. Note The documentation under the categories of 10-Integration and 11-Customisation is common to all deployments types. Note The architecture for Ellipse Select is the same as that for Ellipse. The difference in implementation of Ellipse Select to Ellipse is described in other documentation, and is outside the scope of the architectural overview. Mission ABB s mission is to support customers operations through the provision of timely, relevant and accurate Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) information. From a technical perspective ABB s mission is to simplify the technical architecture required to deploy Ellipse. Key areas of focus are: Architecture Scalability Availability Deployment Scope This information applies for the Ellipse Select product as well as the Ellipse product.
Introduction Ellipse can be deployed as an Appliance, Virtual Appliance and Azure Cloud solution. While support for the application will not change across each of these deployment options, the collection of information and the support relationship to the underlying platform and infrastructure will. Over time this document will grow to include more information on the deployment options that have been offered in addition to the Appliance. When customers engage the ABB support team they will investigate the problem and provide a resolution, which is either a code fix, workaround or configuration change. This includes any embedded 3rd party products such as JBOSS or any embedded virtualisation technology. ABB may recommend an operating system patch to be installed and customers must have a current Oracle Linux support contract. Embedded 3rd party products are included in the standard support contract for Ellipse. Note Oracle Linux is not an embedded product. What do you need to know about tuning and configuration? ABB do not expect customers to tune or change the configuration of embedded products. The solution has been designed to perform in a consistent and predictable way based on the deployment options provided. The various tuning parameters have been set to deliver the desired performance. Customers are not expected to change any of these settings. From time to time ABB may review those settings or in response to a particular issue. If a change is required, ABB will deliver this change using the standard patch procedure for that deployment option. Note From time to time, ABB may direct a customer to make a specific change on the system in advance of a patch to alleviate the issue, however the patch will be required to be installed to complete the resolution. How does a customer help with diagnosis of issues? Customers are expected to have an understanding of web architected solutions to assist ABB in its problem diagnosis of issues. This includes the ability to find the requested diagnostic information, and advise on customer specific information. Customer technical resources will work closely with ABB technical resources to solve specific problems. Tell me about Administering Ellipse? Administering Ellipse requires several administrators, including application administrators for managing security, business policy setup, overnight batch processing and similar application related configuration. The number of administrators may vary depending on the Ellipse deployment option selected. For example: With the appliance deployment customers must manage the Ellipse solution from an infrastructure perspective. They will be required to manage disk space including backup and recovery scenarios; hardware deployment; environment setup including installation of operating systems following the ABB configuration; installation and management of the databases including backup and recovery; performance monitoring of the application solution. Whilst ABB has made many of these tasks simpler and easier to perform under Ellipse 8 they are still required to be performed by the customer. In any IT landscape customers will have other infrastructure administrators managing its IT systems and these will include database administrators, printer administrators, email, active director or LDAP. These administrators will be required to assist administering the overall solution landscape for Ellipse users.
Azure Cloud (PaaS) This section covers the support of the Azure Cloud deployment (PaaS). ABB Enterprise Software Consultants can work with customers to assist the provision of support. Operations and monitoring of the Azure resources The sequence that leads to support includes Operations and Monitoring, which is then followed by Support of any issues found in running Ellipse. Operations The sequence that leads to support includes Operations and Monitoring, which is then followed by Support of any issues found in running Ellipse. Operations of the applications is done through the Azure Portal or Azure command line interface (Cli / Powershell). The main operations that can be performed on the application are: Start Stop Restart Figure: Start, Stop, Restart Ability to restrict these operations can be performed through the implementation of the AD Roles and Policies. A history of all the operations performed against the application is available through the Activity Log function. Figure: History via the Activity Log function Monitoring Monitoring of the applications is done through the Azure Portal. The main portal screen is used to select the Web App with issues by clicking on the overview function. The panel on the right hand side will show the essential metrics for the Web Application. The first indication of any issues is a change in the charts through an unusual pattern being displayed.
Figure: Azure Portal displays Web Apps width: 75% align: center Figure: Review the essential metrics for issues Support The main application is based on Tomcat. This means that support requires the gathering of the main application logs, which can be done via the advanced tools function in the main Web App. Reproduce error Follow the manual steps to reproduce the error, which will cause the error messages to be collected in the application logs. Do not perform any further action which may cause additional log entries (noise) to be added.
Collect screenshots Go to the main application to collect the error displayed on the screen. Consider using a video capture tool to record your sequence of steps required to reproduce the error. Gathering Diagnostics Go to the main Web App and select Advanced Tools. width: 75% align: center Figure: Getting to the Kudu Console Click on the Go Button to enter the Kudu Console. Once this console is displayed then select CMD from the drop down of Debug console. width: 75% align: center Figure: Accessing the Debug console This now opens up the equivalent of a file explorer from which you will be required to collect the logs.
width: 75% align: center Figure: File explorer within Kudu The following directories and their contents (logs) will be required for ABB to supply the required support. D:HomeLogFiles D:Homeefsserverlog D:Homeefsbatch Note ABB may instruct you to download additional files if required. Alternatively the same mechanisms used to upload the deployable WAR files to the Web App can also be used to download the above mentioned directories and files to a local workstation. Refer to the deployment guide.
Virtual Appliance (IaaS) This section covers the support of the Virtual Appliance (IaaS). Operations and monitoring of the Virtual Appliance This is covered in the Ellipse Virtual Appliance Deployment guide >> Monitor Installation of appliance and environments. Support Refer to the Operations guide >> Troubleshooting.
Appliance Diagnostics This discusses the gathering of diagnostic information to troubleshoot early stage Appliance initialisation problems. Ellipse Appliance initialisation is done via a custom kickstart configuration provided by ABB on the installation image that ABB requests customers to copy to the USB thumb installation media and boot the Appliance from. Troubleshooting of Appliance initialisation issues is therefore conducted in a very similar manner to how a standard Linux bootstrap process would be diagnosed. The remainder of this document provides a detailed procedure that customers should follow to gather information for ABB to determine the root cause of early stage Appliance initialisation issues. Reproduce error Follow the manual steps to reproduce the error, which will cause Kickstart / Anaconda to stop. Do not perform any further action which may cause the appliance to reboot Collect screenshots Cycle through all console screens (use Alt-F1.. Alt-F5), and capture screenshots of each of them. Save kickstart logs When an Appliance fails to properly initialise there is no operating system to log into and no obvious local storage where logs form the failed initialisation can be saved. It is also not obvious how or where to find log files that might help. To this end, ABB recommends customers use the USB thumb drive as a storage device onto which logs can be saved and retrieved for later supply to ABB or local review and or analysis. Here s how to do it: 1. Switch to shell prompt: press Alt-F2 2. Create temporary mount point for Thumb: mkdir /thumb 3. Mount first partition on the thumb: mount /dev/sdb1 /thumb Note Depending on the number of storage devices detected by the kernel, the thumb drive might be identified by a different /dev/sd. If in doubt, we recommend using the output of ** fdisk l ** or ** ls l /dev/disk/by-id/usb* ** to find out the correct device name. The first partition on the thumb drive is fairly small and won t be able to store large logs without becoming full. 4. Create a directory on the mount point to store the logs: mkdir /thumb/diag 5. Copy logs and scripts: cp /tmp/* /thumb/diag 6. Save structure of /dev: ls lr /dev > /thumb/diag/dev.lst 7. Flush and unmount the partition : sync && cd / && umount /thumb 8. Retrieve the USB thumb, and send ABB the content of the /thumb/diag directory Outage and Fix Scenarios The following are outage and fix scenarios.
Outage and fix Scenarios Issue Action Resolution Ellipse Software Problem Embedded Software Problem 1. Capture trace 2. Raise a work order with ABB 1. Capture trace 2. Raise a work order with ABB Single system failure 1. Users will required to re-login as system should be configured in High Availability mode Operating System issue Disaster Hardware fault 2. Raise P1 work order with ABB, capture system diagnostics as directed 3. Customer will restart server 1. Raise work order 2. Capture diagnostics as directed 1. Invoke disaster recovery plan 2. Seek assistance from ABB where necessary 1. Customer to liaise with hardware vendor All response times are subject to standard ABB Support response times a. ABB will resolve and ship fix following support guidelines. P1 or next monthly service pack b. Customer to install fix a. ABB will resolve and ship fix following support guidelines. P1 or next monthly service pack b. Customer to install fix a. ABB will assist analysis to determine cause. b. Ship fix as required, c. suggest course of action if required Hardware problem, configuration problem d. Customer will have to liaise with hardware vendor a. ABB to analyse and assist with resolution. b. System change will be shipped as a fix to the configuration. c. Operating system patch will require installation by customer as directed by ABB. d. ABB will update installation to include patch a. Customer will restore database and file system. b. Initiate rebuild of Operating Application servers using ABB automated installation a. Resolve as directed by hardware vendor