Fall 2001

Board of Directors:

Brenda Kirkpatrick, President

Dave Voegele, Vice President

Bellverie Ross, VP Public Relations

Calendar of Events – Fall 2001

9. PATROL for Oracle, McLean, VA

3 PATROL Enterprise Manager – Basic, McLean, VA

11 PATROL For Internet Services, Houston, Texas

18 PATROL for MS Windows NT/2000 Admin Basic, Houston, Texas

25 PATROL Enterprise Manager – Advanced, McLean, VA

9. PATROL Scripting Language – Basic, Costa Mesa, CA

23 PATROL for UNIX Admin – Basic, Mclean, VA

5 – 6 E-Business IT Operations & Management Forum

6 AutoOperator, McLean, VA

12 – 16 COMDEX, Las Vegas, Nevada

12. PATROL Phone Point, Mclean, VA

2- 7 Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California

4 CONTROL D/V, McLean, VA

8 PATROL Scripting Language – Basic, Houston, Texas

11 Service Reporting – Basic Class, Waltham, Massachusetts

12. Control M/R, Waltham, Massachusetts

Wednesday, August 1st

Maggiano’s – Tysons Corner Mall II

Tysons Corner, Virginia

8:30 – 9:00 Registration (Continental Breakfast Provided) 1:00 – 1:45 Predict and Perform 6.6 Visualizer Portal to

9:00 – 9:45 PATROL 7 (Tuscany Part 2) 2:00 – 2:45 Service Reporting Installation and

11:00 - 12:00 Perform and Predict 6.6 Features and Installation Troubleshooting

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch (provided) 3:00 – 3:30 Service Reporting, Understanding Interface with

IIS and Oracle 8I.

3:30 – 4:00 Live Demo Service Reporting: Quick Report

Editor (QRE)

4:00 – 4:30 Product Requirements: tell BMC what we want

PATROL is one of the most robust and feature rich enterprise management platforms available in the market today. Jim Byrd, BMC Software, and Brenda Kirkpatrick, Kirkpatrick Consulting, will be presenting an overview of PATROL showing some of the technical riches of PATROL, some of the most powerful features, and a product overview that will leave your mouth hanging open. Even the most savvy PATROL engineer will be left saying, "I didn’t know PATROL could do all of that". At least that is our goal. After this product overview the incredibly talented Jim Byrd will talk about the new and soon to be released PATROL 7. Please see the next agenda item for PATROL 7 – Tuscany release.

The Patrol 7 architecture, set to be rolled out in stages beginning this fall, initially will give users unified Windows or Web-based consoles for system management data, a reporting portal, and enhanced desktop management capabilities. More important, this first phase of the launch, code-named Tuscany, bolsters BMC's underlying shared name-space technology, enhancing Patrol's ability to extract and correlate data in a unified environment using a common repository. "Now you'll get the same functionality but with a unified view, better usability, better access, easier navigation," BMC Chief Technology Officer Kirill Tatarinov said here at the company's BMC Learning Universe user conference. Ultimately, the improved Patrol will allow users to quickly build targeted management tool sets and offer better root cause and event correlation and analysis of management data, analysts here said. PATROL 7 will have an over-the-top installation which will allow for an easy rollout with "no to low" impact to current installations. Jim is a very PATROL savvy engineer. He was the well known Product Manager for PATROL for Internet Services (PFIS) and a driving force behind PFIS success. Now Jim is the PATROL Core Product Marketing Manager. Jim has presented to our group before and I want to welcome him back and thank him for all his support.

In the true spirit of outstanding support and commitment to the ERPUG, BMC is sending the world renowned Perform and Predict expert Mike Matchett to present this topic and the Visualizer Portal to Service Reporting, see the next agenda item for details. We want to thank Mike for his participation. Mike has been working with BEST1, now known as Perform and Predict since 1995. He has an Electric Engineering from MIT and is very knowledgeable. He was a key solutions architect for BMC and a Service Practice Manager for BMC for years. I can’t wait to hear his presentation. He is very impressive, indeed and we are lucky to land such a great presenter. Thanks BMC for Mike. We really appreciate having this Perform and Predict expertise to present to us on August 1^st.

Extend the Power of PATROL with Perform and Predict:
PATROL for Performance Management provides current and historic performance analysis of business-critical systems and applications. The results of advanced statistical analysis are presented graphically, enabling further drill-down, rapid problem resolution and cost-effective, uninterrupted business processes. Automated web publication of performance reports facilitates communication within the organization.

• Simplifies the entire performance management process for maximum productivity of your IT staff
• Eliminates interruptions to critical business processes and ensures continuous customer satisfaction
• Improves communication through flexible graphical reporting tools
• Maximizes return on investments through optimized use of system resources

Extend the Power of PATROL for Performance Management with Prediction
PATROL for Prediction and Capacity Management provides advanced modeling and analysis of changes in hardware, applications and transaction rates. Potential solutions to performance problems or configuration changes to accommodate growth can be validated without expense or disruption to business processes. Accurate prediction of response time issues is an essential step in problem prevention and service level management.

• New platforms: Solaris 8, Compaq Tru64 UNIX up to 5.1, Sequent 4.48, W2K DataCenter, Linux
• Internationalization support
• Operation Status Reporting Utility (OSR)
• Solaris Resource Manager Report – SRM (Fair Share Scheduling)
• Firewall support and investigate
• Specint 2000 Support
• XML
• Improved Graphics

For anyone who has seen Visualizer you know how exciting this product is. This a feature rich product from BMC which offers an outstanding graphical representation of Performance and Prediction data. The complexity of the data is overcome by the sheer elegance of the display. Yes, I do believe that Visualizer is one of the most exciting BMC product offerings. With all that being said, now imagine all this published to your web! That’s the newest exciting product enhancement from BMC for Perform and Predict. Visualizer has always allowed publishing to any web server but now the web server is an integral part of the product and you can integrate all the awesome features of Service Reporting as well. Well, all I can say is, thanks to BMC for another job well done.

Don’t miss your chance to see one of BMC’s most renowned Service Reporting technicians present on the installation and troubleshooting for Service Reporting. Michael Rogge has over 17 years of experience and is one awesome person to work with. His knowledge runs the gammit. He has knowledge about Oracle, PATROL, IIS, Java, SQLPlus, Actuate, Perform and Predict, NT, 2000, and a host of other acculates. He is also a very good computer programmer. He was honored this year as one of BMC Top Gun engineers. This is an award given by BMC for outstanding performance and I can attest to his dedication, commitment, and outstanding technical expertise. Thanks, BMC, for sending Mike to present on Service Reporting. I plan to corner Mike and pick his brain. I think if I can know 1/8^th of what is in his head, I’ll be a genius.

Once you Service Reporting you know the value of the product. Installation, however, can be difficult. This is no fault of BMC. As it turns out we all have different setups for our web server environments. Simple problems can quickly snowball into an unusable Service Reporting installation. Mike will show us basic NT account setups, IIS setup, NT registry entries, Oracle8I registry variable settings and so much more to ensure we have an easy Service Reporting installation. Mike has seen it all as a BMC support person dedicated to Service Reporting for the last 2 years. He is also an NT guru so please don’t miss you opportunity to learn as much as you can about Service Reporting via Mike. If you miss this one, you will truly miss out on an outstanding opportunity. The ERPUG wants to thank BMC and Mike for their dedication to us by offering us so much expertise on this subject.

Mike is an extremely savvy engineer, systems administrator, UNIX and NT expert, awesome presenter, and all around great guy.

This is the second part to Installation and Troubleshooting of Service Reporting Installation. This presentation focuses on IIS and Oracle8I setup to support Service Reporting. Mike is going to go above and beyond the call of duty and give us the interface secrets for Service Reporting to IIS and Oracle8i. This is an exciting presentation that will benefit anyone in the web publishing, web support, and web usage, that’s all of us, business.

The Service Reporting Quick Report Editor (QRE) is so powerful and easy to use. Some folks, however, may not be familiar with the product offerings and capabilities. We are going to show you how, in minutes, to create custom reports to publish to your intranet or extranet subscribers.

BMC is providing us with a tremendous offer. This session is gives us the opportunity to tell BMC what to build. This is our unique opportunity to have input to the BMC product development. We are going to get in on the development cycle early enough to make a real difference!

We have had great turnouts for our Eastern Regional PATROL Users Group (ERPUG) meetings! BMC Software is committed to having someone from BMC Education and Services and/or BMC Software Consultant group at all the meetings. This is great for us because we receive exceptional education at a substantially discounted rate.

I believe we learned a lot from our presenters over the past couple of years. We shared antidotes, woes, and success stories, which is the purpose of the ERPUG. I couldn't be more pleased with the group. I receive requests for ERPUG membership on a daily basis, which tells me that we really needed this kind of forum.

Before, they should be copy-ready. If you need any help with writing an article, just ask. We have extend the PATROL umbrella to include integrated products such as Remedy, CuraMessage, Network Node Manager, Spectrum, PeopleSoft, SAP R/3, HP/ITO, so articles on these products are equally as welcome.

Keep in mind that the presentation agendas are strictly based on comments from members like you. We count the number of requests for each topic and create the agenda based on the requests. If you want to see a presentation then vote either at the meeting, via email, via US mail or by calling the ERPUG.

Please send questions for a "Dear ERPUG" column. Responses will be both e-mailed to you and included in the ERPUG Newsletter. If you have an answer for a commonly asked question, please send both question and answer to "Dear ERPUG".

If you have any ideas for regular columns, please send ideas and/or columns to me. If you have an

idea, but don't wish to author a column, or vice versa, please contact me at (703) 968-8844 and maybe, together, we can find a solution.

The ERPUG Newsletter is picture-friendly. I encourage any and all pictures that can be made available, from pictures of authors to spectacular consoles. Pictures in .tif format are best for me, but we'll use anything from electronic to hard-copy.

I hope to see all of you on August 1st!!

Q: When using PemnBPslExec(s_hComm, USE_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT, 0, script) I sometimes get a timeout error. What can cause this?

A: I’ve experienced 3 scenarios that cause a timeout when using the PemnBPslExec command. The first is a syntax error in the PSL code. The second is some kind of connection issue. The third option is to check is the length of the argument being past. The PSL reference manual, for you

PATROL release level, specifies the maximum size of the argument, in characters.

Q: When I use the "d:/patrol3-3/bin/dump_hist -p 1598 -host HOSTNAMEa" PATROL dumps a lot of data for HOSTNAMEa. But, I only want today's data from CPU or may be CPU KM data for 7 days. How do I can specify the start time and end time? Also, how can I run the script automatic once a day?

A: To run the command automatically everyday, you will have to do something to generate the mmddhhmm[yyyy] portion of the argument list on each invocation so it specifies the current day. It just depends upon what you write the script in. Your script or program will have to generate the correct values for -s (start date), -e (end date), and plug them in.

In Perl the localtime(time) function returns a nine-element list corrected for the local timezone as follows: ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);

You would then use the appropriate variables to make up the mmddhhmm[yyyy].

dump_hist [-p port]

[-host hostname]

[-class regexp]

[-inst regexp]

[-format OPTIONS format]

[-param regexp]

[-s mmddhhmm[yyyy]]

[-e mmddhhmm[yyyy]]

[-timestamp]

[-annotate]

[-nostat]

[-v]

Q: I want to call an external C++ program, pass some argument to it, then expect some return value from it. I see I can use popen to open the channel then close it.

I need to do it each time I run Discovery. Is there a way the process will always stay in memory so that it doesn't involve expensive process creation and termination? An example will be greatly appreciated.

C++ program:

main()

{

char argument[256];

char result[256];

gets(argument);

// do something depend on the argument

// then return the value

puts(result);

}

A: Look at the close() function in the PSL Reference Manual for the optional flags argument. Bit1 = 1 indicates to kill the system process associated with the channel when closing the channel. Bit2 = 1 indicates the channel should be closed even if another PSL Process is blocked on the channel. Bit1 and Bit2 by default are 0 which means the system process associated with the channel are allowed to continue.

Q: On NT how do I check to ensure the PatrolAgent is running?

A: You can do the following:

1) if service rcmdserv (remote command server) is running on the target computer, you can send a net start command from your "master" to the target and see if the agent is running.

2) you will find on the net (www.sysinternals.com) PsExec.exe that allows you to open a remote command line port and send the net start command if service rcmdserv is not running on the target computer.

3) you can use PatrolCLI from the "master" and send a "patrol ping" to the target agent (see PatrolCLI documentation).

Q: Can I clear the agent output screen for a PSL command?

A: Actually the only escape sequences that will be properly handled are clear screen for ANSI and VT100 terminals (Esc [H Esc 2J and Esc [;H Esc 2J), that being said, this is obviously a UNIX only answer. You can do the following:

print(get("/clearText"));

you will print the ANSI terminal clear screen escape sequence:

In my case I got and substituted in:

%PSL printf("%c[H%c[2J",27,27);

As mentioned above, this escape sequence in not understood properly by the NT console.

Q: Has anyone had any luck getting the TEXTLOG monitoring to find files that are in directories with spaces/different cases in the name?

For example:

e:\Program Files\Tivoli\TSM\baclient\dsmsched.log

I continue to receive the error:

myfilename does not exist!

A: This is a known bug (BMC Failure record 248033)

The fix will be in the next release

Q: Does anyone know how patrol can monitor mapped drives? I do not need statistics about the drive, just know if it is still connected or not.

A: You can use the Microsoft Windows <i>net</i> command to monitor both local and remote network shares.

<code>

# Display remote network shares

remote_shares = system("net use");

print(remote_shares);

# Display local network shares

local_shares = system("net share");

print(local_shares);

</code>

Well there are so many good questions that I’m afraid I will have to wait until the next newsletter to answer them all. I apologize to anyone who was hoping for an answer to his or her question in this newsletter. Please feel free to call.

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