Customer Care Package
for better WebSphere Diagnostics
This document describes some tools that can
be given to select customers to help in diagnosing WebSphere problems.
These tools are NOT public and they not to
be distributed to customers without prior approval from Betsy Matthew.
Please print of forward a copy of this document
to customers as a cover letter for the tools.
Customers: When reporting problems, please inform IBM support that you have been given these tools to assist in problem determination.
Following is the Tool list:
Tool descriptions:
Slim First Failure Data Capture:
Purpose: This tool captures the root
cause of problems when they occur. This reduces the need for tracing
and helps both the customer and IBM obtain problem resolution faster.
Description: To accomplish the above,
an instrumented version of java.lang.Throwable is provided with a tunable
filter. The filter is a text file used to distinguish between benign
exceptions to skip and severe problems to log. The instrumentation
prints exceptions to standard out and call stacks to standard error.
This helps identify the root cause in the cases when elusive exceptions
are absorbed or re-mapped by the runtime.
Package Contents:
Purpose: Saves
time by eliminating the manual step of collecting log files and other facts
about the system where the failure occurred.
Description: This tool is a self
contained jar file. When a problem occurs on a machine, a system
operator can run this simple tool. It is very easy to run. Simply
typing: java -jar Collector will invoke
this tool and it will create a single output file called WASenv.jar
which contains all the data - such as versions, logs, PTFs, efixes, etc.
- that is normally gathered when reporting a problem to IBM support.
Package Contents:
Purpose: This tool can be setup by
customer operations teams to help detect hung WebSphere processes or Hosts.
Description: This tool is not available
at this time. The IBM team is working the details of how best to
provide this feature.
Purpose: Viewing all Classes and
ClassLoader relationships in a process.
Description: This tool is provided
in the form of a servlet. When invoked, it displays all ClassLoaders
and associated loaded Classes. Another view that is available is
one that can be used to navigate from a Class back to its corresponding
ClassLoader.
Package Contents:
Purpose: Admin Database integrity checks.
Description: This tool can be invoked
periodically by system operators to check the integrity of the WebSphere
Admin Repository. It is recommended that this tool be run before
and after every - significant - configuration change that is made.
Customers who have experienced corruption of the Admin Repository are encouraged
to perform database back ups periodically and run this tool. The
back ups will help restore operation back from a stable state. The
tool provided will help verify the health of the WebSphere Admin Repository
tables. This tool can be made available upon request. Please
contact Tom Gissel
(gissel@us.ibm.com).
For questions or additional information on these tools please email us: Hany Salem and Tom Gissel, IBM Serviceablity Team.
Note to IBM support team: Please find this package at: http://hany.austin.ibm.com/Tools
or at