Objectives

TIBCO ActiveMatrix users are often faced with a question of how the current health of an Enterprise can be determined, especially if a substantial deployment effort is being planned. In such situations, users should be able to proceed with confidence that the deployment will complete without any significant system issues, such as TIBCO Enterprise Message Server (EMS) running out of connections, or TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator losing connectivity with the Database, or a disk on a remote machine running low on space, to name a few.

Enterprise Deployment Health Check has the following main objectives:

  • Know your TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator
  • View real time information about ancillary entities used by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator
  • Get real time information about TIBCO ActiveMatrix entities (Runtime nodes and the hosts that manage nodes)
  • Present the real time information collected based on relevance
  • Ping TIBCO ActiveMatrix entities in real time
  • Run test deployments
  • Highlight key information in a well-formatted output
  • Create a comprehensive and parsable report

Get all information about TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator at a Single Destination

The Enterprise Deployment Health Check makes it easy for you to extract all the following information at a single destination:
  • Configuration (Metadata) of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator
  • Backend database information
  • Notification Server (Qin) information
  • Whether it is configured to use LDAP versus database for user authentication
  • Basic information such as enterprise name, the TIBCO_HOME and CONFIG_HOME used

Get real time information about ancillary entities used by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator

Some situations require knowledge of more than just the metadata of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator, such as real-time information about all the ancillary entities listed in the previous section, for instance:

  • Availability of the Notification Server (Qin) and its configuration details
  • Number of notifications processed by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator after a restart.
  • Whether the database used by the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator for User Authentication is available, the number of free database connections available
  • Maximum number of database connections set
  • Number of connections created on the Notification Server (Qin) by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Enterprise from each machine in the enterprise
  • Whether TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator is configured to use the TIBCO Service Performance Manager (SPM) Probe
  • Whether the connections to the SPM Probe’s TIBCO EMS Server are available
  • Whether TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator is managing TIBCO BPM environments, and if so, the number of BPM nodes, or number of TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM applications whose earlier versions are in “Preparing For Undeploy” (PFU) state
  • Total number of HTTP threads used by External or Internal HTTP connectors

Additionally, you can also get the JVM (SystemNode) and machine information to gauge the complete health of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator.

To summarize, the following conditions have to be met for the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator to run smoothly and be available to manage the Enterprise and handle Application deployment:

  • Working database connection, to read or write Enterprise’s metadata.
  • Working LDAP or database connection to authenticate the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator user.
  • Steady Connectivity to TIBCO EMS server (Notification Server) to track lifecycle events of Hosts and Nodes.
  • Ample available memory (JVM settings) and CPU time to run the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator (SystemNode) in a responsive manner.
  • Other system resources, such as available ‘file descriptors’, ample physical memory on the machine so as to avoid memory swapping or paging.
  • Sufficient disk space and user access for the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator to store and manage user artifacts (for example, DAAs and user certificates).

Get real time information about TIBCO ActiveMatrix entities (Runtime Nodes and the Hosts that manage them)

For a successful deployment, it is essential that the participating Hosts and Nodes also be healthy. For Hosts and Nodes, this includes:
  • Ample available memory (JVM settings).
  • In case of Hosts, steady connectivity to the machine on which TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator is running, to download runtime artifacts. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator, in turn, must have steady connectivity to the Host’s JMX port to initiate deployment.
  • Hosts must have steady connectivity to the Node’s JMX port to delegate deployment tasks.
  • In case of Nodes, the Platform Application and Component Framework (running within each Node) needs to be Running.
  • The Machine that is running the Hosts and Nodes needs to have sufficient available memory and CPU time to support the computational needs of the Hosts and Nodes.
  • Other system resources, such as available ‘file descriptors’, ample physical memory on the machine so as to avoid memory swapping/paging, and so on.

At present, there are means to inspect these details independently using various tools available to measure each of these requirements. However, with this feature, all the information is consolidated in a single report and you can refer to that singular source to gauge the health of the entire Enterprise.

Present the real time information collected above based on relevance

When Enterprise Deployment Health Check is run for a set of entities (for example, certain Hosts or Nodes) or Enterprise-wide, a lot of information is produced. This information can be overwhelming to parse at once. Enterprise Deployment Health Check summarizes the information in terms of the entities that are "Most used". With this, you can find out the Node and/or Environment that has the highest number of applications deployed on it, the machine in the enterprise with the highest CPU usage, or memory usage, and so forth.

Ping TIBCO ActiveMatrix entities in real time

You can get the health of the TIBCO ActiveMatrix enterprise in terms of "Up" or "Down". You can choose to ping the entire enterprise, or ping nodes that belong to a set of environments, or ping nodes managed by a set of hosts, or simply ping specific nodes in a given environment.

Run real time test deployments

Getting static information about the Enterprise can only give a limited amount of insight into the Enterprise, so Enterprise Deployment Health Check also provides an option to perform a "dry run" test deployment. The test deployment can be made to various selections of entities:
  • The entire enterprise
  • Nodes that belong to a set of environments
  • Nodes managed by a set of hosts
  • Specific nodes in a given environment

Highlight key information with a well formatted output

When Enterprise Deployment Health Check is executed, the key information is extracted from the collected data and presented it in well-defined format. This includes comprehensive error reporting.

Create a comprehensive and parsable report

When Enterprise Deployment Health Check is run, a comprehensive report (in either XML or JSON formats) is produced. This report is built on a well-defined schema and can be parsed by various tools for further processing. The report file contains all the information collected during complete execution of the Enterprise Deployment Health Check.