Runtime Administration Overview

This article introduces the management tools that you use with Spotfire Streaming. The tools discussed in this article are:

  • The epadmin Command-line Tool.

  • JMX

  • Problem Reporting

epadmin Command

A command-line interface to all of the administrative capabilities is provided in the form of the epadmin command, for which a complete reference can be found in EP Commands. The command-line interface has the advantage of being invoked by shell scripts for automation of specific tasks.

JMX

Spotfire Streaming supports JMX access to all runtime administrative commands equivalent to the epadmin command, and to many engine commands equivalent the legacy sbadmin or matching epadmin commands for EventFlow engines.

Spotfire Streaming's support for JMX is discussed on JMX Monitoring.

Problem Reporting

Problem reporting is critical to allow continuous improvement of the Spotfire Streaming product.

In the event of a node error or node crash, providing the following information in all reported issues help us resolve problems in a timely fashion:

  • A concise description of what caused the problem, including these details:

    • Production or development environment.

    • Is the problem reproducible? If not, how often does it occur?

    • Deployment tool crash or hang?

    • Node crash or hang?

    • Is the node running on a virtual machine?

  • A simple program, or administrative commands, that recreates the problem.

  • Any screen shots that contain error information.

  • A snapshot of the node.

A node snapshot is a set of diagnostic information captured by the epadmin create snapshot command. This creates an archive containing log files and other information required to help troubleshoot problems. A snapshot archive can be captured for an active or a failed node. The support team may ask you to create a snapshot for certain cases.

There are also cases where a node automatically creates a snapshot if an internal error is detected. Provide such snapshot files when reporting the failure.

Warning

Sensitive data in configuration that is not encrypted is exposed as plain text in the snapshot archive. This may include plain text passwords in configuration. All sensitive data in configuration should be encrypted as described in Encrypting Sensitive Configuration Data.

To take a snapshot of a running node, use the servicename or hostname and adminport parameters. If the node is not running, use the installpath parameter. Both cases are shown in the following example. Taking a snapshot of a running node has no impact on the node. 

#
#   Snapshot of a running node with a service name of A:
#
epadmin --servicename=A create snapshot
    Created snapshot archive '/opt/RUN/./A/../snapshots/A/A.2015-04-10-09-42-33.zip'

#
#   Snapshot of a down node installed into a directory named A
#
epadmin create snapshot --installpath=A
    Created snapshot archive '/opt/RUN/A/../snapshots/A/A.2015-04-10-09-43-26.zip'