Happy Friday Everyone

Does anyone know when the Microsoft Systems Center 2012 Integration will be available?

Thanks,

Brandy

Does anyone have a "business continuity" logo they wouldn't mind sharing with me?  I'd like to use it on all of our Business Continuity documentation in conjunction with our company logo.  It would certainly help to give the Business Continuity Program a "brand" or "image".  I've searched the internet, but nothing is very striking......

How to group a list of events under an incident. Is there a way to do that in xmatters. Currently in our xmatters configuration, each incident is related to one event number.

Has anyone had any success migrating an exsting(xmatters 4.1) MSSQL db to Oracle 11g?

Hi, We are on alarmpoint version 4.0 Patch 12 on windows and need to knwo how we can export data from alarmpoint.

Hi Nick,

Do you know if AlarmPoint / xMatters has certified Avaya for a Nortel CS1000 PBX system?

If not, do you know what we need to do to start working towards having the integration certified?

Thanks,

Brandy

Hello All,

I’m in the beginning stages of learning and configuring xMatters and I’m a little confused on “Group Supervisors” and “Users I Supervise”.  If a user is made the Supervisor of a group, should that Supervisor get a list of Users from that group under their “Users I Supervise”?  

Today, I was working with a client that needed to delete an externally owned user but did not know the external key of the record.  I am going to describe what this "externally owned" is and indicate a few options on how to handle this particular scenario.

What is an externally owned data element (person for example)

The purpose of "externally owned" is to allow data to be "controlled" external to the xMatters product and synchronized periodically into the xMatters product.  To manage this, you need a mechanism to:

1. Flag specific records of data as externally owned and thus not deletable within the xMatters Web UI
   This is managed by the data synchronization toolkit and each record in each table has the option to be flagged as externally owned.  If it is flagged as externally owned then it cannot be deleted in the Web UI and "potentially" is not changeable in the Web UI.
   Example: The record for bsmith (Bob Smith) is considered externally owned and cannot be deleted
2. Flag specific fields within the record as externally ownded and thus not changeable within the xMatters Web UI
   This is managed in the Web UI under the admin tab.  You can configure the application to not allow specific field elements not to be changed.
   Example: bsmith's first name has been identified as controlled externally and cannot be modified within xMatters

What is the problem the client experienced?

The client needed to  delete a user in the xMatters system but did not have the external key.  They could not delete it in the Web UI and they were struggling to understand how to "manually" delete this user.

Challenges to approach:

1. The product does not display the "external key" within the Web UI.  Without the external key, the record cannot be updated and/or deleted via the Data Synchronization toolkit.
2. An externally owned record cannot be deleted within the Web UI.

What are the options to manage this process?

There are a number of options as follows:

1. Recommended best practices
   Use the export functionality of the data synchronization toolkit to export all of the data records into the Data Staging environment.  Once this is complete, you will have the ability to review the value of the external keys and even modify the record and then update and/or delete it via importing it.
2. A slightly more risky option
   Caveat: The database contains the reference to whether or not the data is externally owned and the external key needed to interact with the record.  I do recommend that extreme care is used with accessing our database directly. The database should be backed up and the changes should happen and be tested in a Development environment.
   
   The table that hold the external key and the externally_owned flag for users/groups/teams/devices is the recipients table.  This table can be:
   • Queried directly to understand the value of the external key:
     
     

SELECT SYNC_EXTERNAL_KEY

FROM  ALARMPOINT4.RECIPIENTS

WHERE TARGET_NAME = “bsmith”

AND DELETED_ID = "-1"

AND RECIPIENT_CAT = "PERSON"

• Updated directly to change the value of the externally owned flag allowing the record to be deleted via the Web UI

UPDATE ALARMPOINT4.RECIPIENTS

SET IS_EXTERNALLY_OWNED = "N"

WHERE TARGET_NAME = "bsmith"

AND DELETED_ID = "-1"

AND RECIPIENT_CAT = "PERSON"

What is the actual Risk here?

You will immediately note that there are several additional requirements (ANDs) in the WHERE clause and you might wonder what these represent.  In this case I will use this to point out that the data can be complicated and you need to be careful.  For example:

1. By removing the RECIPIENT_CAT = "PERSON" line in the above update would result in setting not only bob smith as no longer externally owned but all his devices as well.
2. By removing the DELETED_ID = "-1" line in the above update would result in setting not only the current bob smith record as no longer externally owned but also any historical "deleted" records as well.

Why would you leverage the risky solution?

In this case, the client was leveraging the staging environment as a point of audit and retrieving the data from the xMatters runtime into the staging tables (export) would have impacted this business need.  Alternatively we could have installed a second set of Data Staging tables and reconfigured the process to leverage those tables for export but there were time constraints and this was a development process so the risk was deemed acceptable.

In my application server logs, I'm seeing a lot of entries such as:

2012-05-17 16:57:02,130 [NotificationDispatcherInternalEventTimer] ERROR   -  - Transaction (Process ID 192) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

2012-05-17 16:57:02,131 [NotificationDispatcherInternalEventTimer] ERROR   -  - org.springframework.dao.CannotAcquireLockException: could not execute query; nested exception is org.hibernate.exception.LockAcquisitionException: could not execute query

org.springframework.dao.CannotAcquireLockException: could not execute query; nested exception is org.hibernate.exception.LockAcquisitionException: could not execute query

Caused by:

org.hibernate.exception.LockAcquisitionException: could not execute query

Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: Transaction (Process ID 192) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

2012-05-17 16:57:28,756 [ProcessDispatchRequestTimer] ERROR   -  - Transaction (Process ID 214) was deadlocked on lock | communication buffer resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

2012-05-17 16:57:28,756 [ProcessDispatchRequestTimer] ERROR   -  - Exception: org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateJdbcException: JDBC exception on Hibernate data access; nested exception is org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: could not execute query

Do others have these type of entries?  I assume the server is retrying, just not sure why all these deadlocks are occuring.

All,

I have a question. We currently have NNMi 9.23 in our environment. I'm wondering if anyone has experience running the xMatters HP NNM 9.1 integration on NNM version 9.2x?

Thanks,

Michael Stevens

HP Advanced Solutions Inc.

Has anyone adjusted this value for their xMatters JVMs?

Does xMatters have a minimum value for this setting?

On Windows 2008 R2 x64 with 4GB of RAM and xMatters Web Server the ONLY application installed on the server, I'm getting an OutOfMemoryError.

Memory options in the webserver-start.conf are:

-Xms1152m

-Xmx1152m

-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

I can reduce the Xms if need be, but some solutions I've seen suggest lowering the stack size.  Seems like with 4GB of RAM should be able to allocate 1.1GB fo to the heap.

Any idea what the default stack size is?  What is the minimum value that it can safely be?  512k?  1024k?

2012-11-26 03:07:27,723 () [Thread-21] ERROR core.runnable - Exception executing command org.apache.cocoon.components.flow.ContinuationsManagerImpl$1@1d99376

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread

http://community.xmatters.com/docs/DOC-1193#comment-1583

I need some feedback from Control M customers.

Here at xMatters we're in the process of updating our Control-M integration and adding support for Control-M 8.

The integration points have changed quite significantly since our last version was released and I am looking at what properties we should use to populate our messages.

Here is an example of a response from the Control-M API which shows what properties are available for us to use.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">

  <SOAP-ENV:Body>

    <ctmem:response_act_retrieve_jobs xmlns:ctmem="http://www.bmc.com/ctmem/schema800">

      <ctmem:retrieved_nodes_number>1</ctmem:retrieved_nodes_number>

      <ctmem:jobs>

        <ctmem:job>

          <ctmem:job_data>

            <ctmem:control_m>vic-vw-ctrl-m</ctmem:control_m>

            <ctmem:order_id>0000r</ctmem:order_id>

            <ctmem:rba>00000r</ctmem:rba>

            <ctmem:table_rba>000000</ctmem:table_rba>

            <ctmem:application/>

            <ctmem:application_type>OS</ctmem:application_type>

            <ctmem:group/>

            <ctmem:job_name>aarons dir job3</ctmem:job_name>

            <ctmem:mem_name/>

            <ctmem:mem_lib/>

            <ctmem:order_table>aaronfolder2</ctmem:order_table>

            <ctmem:owner>administrator</ctmem:owner>

            <ctmem:description>aarons test job</ctmem:description>

            <ctmem:task_type>Command</ctmem:task_type>

            <ctmem:time_zone/>

            <ctmem:in_BIM_service>0</ctmem:in_BIM_service>

            <ctmem:job_status>Ended OK</ctmem:job_status>

            <ctmem:job_state>Run (9)</ctmem:job_state>

            <ctmem:state_digits>000030010000000</ctmem:state_digits>

            <ctmem:odate>130627</ctmem:odate>

            <ctmem:otime>20130627105642</ctmem:otime>

            <ctmem:next_time>20130627110800</ctmem:next_time>

            <ctmem:rerun_counter>00008</ctmem:rerun_counter>

            <ctmem:average_runtime>000001</ctmem:average_runtime>

            <ctmem:start_time>20130627110716</ctmem:start_time>

            <ctmem:end_time>20130627110716</ctmem:end_time>

            <ctmem:critical>1</ctmem:critical>

            <ctmem:cyclic>1</ctmem:cyclic>

            <ctmem:emergency>False</ctmem:emergency>

            <ctmem:time_from>0938</ctmem:time_from>

            <ctmem:time_until/>

          </ctmem:job_data>

       </ctmem:job>

      </ctmem:jobs>

    </ctmem:response_act_retrieve_jobs>

  </SOAP-ENV:Body>

</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

I've attached a snippet from the Control-M API guide that explains what these fields are.

We are passing all of these properties to xMatters so all of them are available to use in subscriptions and messages.

However, by default I want to limit the content of the messages so they only contain the essential information needed. Anything else can be added to the message content later of course but I'm taking the less is more approach for setting up the default messages.

Here's what we've got at the moment. We're still a month or so away from completing this so there is plenty of time to make an update if we've missed anything.

All feedback welcome!

This is a continuation from the Spectrum Subscription Panel Thread http://community.xmatters.com/message/8095#8095  I'm creating a discussion as that one was splintering quite a bit.

This issue was discovered by Jason and Rodney- Essentially, Model Names were getting truncated to 16 characters in the output list.  Here are some of my findings (largely copied from the other thread)

This appears to be occurring from Spectrum (or at least the call that is used from xMatters to Spectrum).  The way I validated was as follows:

Using Kim's previous comments...From your Spectrum box at the command lineNavigate to <SpecHome>\vmnshRun "connect <SpecServerName>"Run "Show Models"
You'll notice a list of all the models, and that they are truncated in this display as well.  You can then run a search from the xMatters Spectrum Subscription Sub-Panel for one of the truncated names and note that the truncations match. Part of the root issue is found in the CA Spectrum CLI Guide on page 11:

CLIMNAMEWIDTH

Displays a model name. By default, the create, seek, and show commands each display a maximum of 16 characters for a model name. However, with the environment variable CLIMNAMEWIDTH, you can specify up to 1024 characters to be displayed for model names. For example, using the C shell:

setenv CLIMNAMEWIDTH 32

You can set this variable in your .login file, in a script, or just before you issue a command. You can set or change any number of times in a CLI session, depending on the length of the model names.

I made some small progress:

So in Windows I defined a Windows System Variable and called it "CLIMNAMEWIDTH" and gave it a value of 32.  We then restarted the Spectrum service.  When I run the 'Show Models' from the Command Line it now outputs with 32 as the width.  However, in xMatters on the Subscription Sub-Panel, it now appears to truncate at 18 characters instead of 16...so there's still some truncation, but a little bit more is displayed.
With debug on, I was monitoring the APIA AlarmPoint.log and it displays the models coming back from Spectrum.  One of the big things I noticed was that when using 'show models' from the command line it would show very clean, with the APIA output it appeared to be inserting spaces in the middle of model names which was then not getting parsed properly for output.  I think there may be something going on with the way the results are being handled.

Hello.

I would like to know if it is possible that you help us with this situation. I have the next script that works fine.

/global/proactive/APClient/APAgent/APClient --map-data default 8 "Alive de Oncall" "Alive de Oncall generado por BEM" Alive text_pager

Though, I have the following questions:

1. 1.- In this script the 8 is the user ID, however I need to send a message without the ID, so can I use a phone number instead of  the user ID (8)?
2. 2.- Is it possible to send this script if the user is not created in the xMatters application?

Please let me know if you need more information, I look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Hey clients and xPerts!

   Does anyone have any experience with the BMC Control - M integration? And can anyone speak to Distributed vs Mainframe implemtations of Control -M and how the integration (can?) handle that. If you don't want to post here, feel free to pm me or email travis.depuy@techport13.com.

In this particular case, the client is using 6.3.09 mainframe.

Thanks!!

    --- Travis

Hi ,

we are trying to configure the SMS service   for the AT & T   service provider . we already configure the tap provider details  &  user service provider details

while validating  the device   we are getting  the connection failure error message in tap  log file

please help me to  resolve the issue

Error Message :

2013-04-03 08:51:26,041 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - =>AT&FE0F1<CR>

2013-04-03 08:51:46,056 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - Close serial port

2013-04-03 08:51:46,150 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - Close input stream

2013-04-03 08:51:46,150 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - Close output stream

2013-04-03 08:51:50,150 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - TAP: Connection closed.

2013-04-03 08:51:50,150 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-5] DEBUG   -  - Send notification event. Notification ID: 611152 Status: CONNECTION_FAILURE

2013-04-03 08:51:53,712 [TAPDeviceEngineInternalEventTimer] DEBUG   -  - Send work request. Cluster:  Protocol: TAP Number of resources: 1

2013-04-03 08:51:56,134 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - =>AT&FE0F1<CR>

2013-04-03 08:52:16,149 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - Close serial port

2013-04-03 08:52:16,243 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - Close input stream

2013-04-03 08:52:16,243 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - Close output stream

2013-04-03 08:52:20,243 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - TAP: Connection closed.

2013-04-03 08:52:20,243 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-1] DEBUG   -  - Send notification event. Notification ID: 611152 Status: CONNECTION_FAILURE

2013-04-03 08:52:23,727 [TAPDeviceEngineInternalEventTimer] DEBUG   -  - Send work request. Cluster:  Protocol: TAP Number of resources: 1

2013-04-03 08:52:26,071 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - =>AT&FE0F1<CR>

2013-04-03 08:52:46,086 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - Close serial port

2013-04-03 08:52:46,180 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - Close input stream

2013-04-03 08:52:46,180 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - Close output stream

2013-04-03 08:52:50,180 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - TAP: Connection closed.

2013-04-03 08:52:50,180 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-2] DEBUG   -  - Send notification event. Notification ID: 611152 Status: CONNECTION_FAILURE

2013-04-03 08:52:53,742 [TAPDeviceEngineInternalEventTimer] DEBUG   -  - Send work request. Cluster:  Protocol: TAP Number of resources: 1

2013-04-03 08:52:56,117 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - =>AT&FE0F1<CR>

2013-04-03 08:53:16,132 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - Close serial port

2013-04-03 08:53:16,226 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - Close input stream

2013-04-03 08:53:16,226 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - Close output stream

2013-04-03 08:53:20,226 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - TAP: Connection closed.

2013-04-03 08:53:20,226 [tapEngineManager-process-pool-thread-3] DEBUG   -  - Send notification event. Notification ID: 611152 Status: CONNECTION_FAILURE

2013-04-03 08:53:23,742 [TAPDeviceEngineInternalEventTimer] DEBUG   -  - Send work request. Cluster:  Protocol: TAP Number of resources: 1

2013-04-03 08:53:33,757 [TAPDeviceEngineInternalEventTimer] DEBUG   -  - Send work request. Cluster:  Protocol

We have just started on our journey of using xMatters to help improve our on-call management and communications.

Instead of boring you with details on our set up and usage, I will dive right into a use case that has been cumbersome for us to deal with on a day to day basis.

Situation - We have a fairly serious incident that requires rapid support from multiple groups.

Current State - We construct messages for each on-call group individually.  We do this because when we put multiple groups in one message, the progression in xMatters stops when anyone on the message acknowledges the on-call.

Desired outcome - We would like to be able to put multpile groups in one message and have xMatters handle EACH included group's oncall schedule, notifications, and escalations separately by group.  So, when Group A's on-call acknowledges the message, the notification and escalations continue to occur for Groups B, C, and D until all groups have reached an on-call and are acknowledged.

We thought about using the Outbound Only option in this scenario, but the problem there is it notifies everyone in the groups and does not follow the schedules and escalations as needed (besides the fact that those messages do not require acknowledgement).

Anyone else have this same need?  If so, how are you dealing with it?

Thanks,

Harry

Hi, I am using SMSGlobal as a service provider for text message via SMPP protocol to receive text alerts from AlarmPoint for one of my customer's implementation. However, part of their security requirement, the alert needs to go through a proxy (which is called 'Blue Coat') in order to send sms out and vice versa. I understand that the proxy settings in AlarmPoint is by using the SOCKS5 protocol. Any idea how do I configure this in Blue Coat?

Has anyone adjusted this value for their xMatters JVMs?

Does xMatters have a minimum value for this setting?

On Windows 2008 R2 x64 with 4GB of RAM and xMatters Web Server the ONLY application installed on the server, I'm getting an OutOfMemoryError.

Memory options in the webserver-start.conf are:

-Xms1152m

-Xmx1152m

-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

I can reduce the Xms if need be, but some solutions I've seen suggest lowering the stack size.  Seems like with 4GB of RAM should be able to allocate 1.1GB fo to the heap.

Any idea what the default stack size is?  What is the minimum value that it can safely be?  512k?  1024k?

2012-11-26 03:07:27,723 () [Thread-21] ERROR core.runnable - Exception executing command org.apache.cocoon.components.flow.ContinuationsManagerImpl$1@1d99376

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread

http://community.xmatters.com/docs/DOC-1193#comment-1583

We are setting up our integration to HP Service Manager.  We have our AP webservices fronted by IIS in order to enfoce SSL as well as in our prod environment let the webservcies be load balanced along with the user interface. 

It HP Service Manager  in the AlarmPointConfig if we use:

https://our.host.name/api/services/AlarmPointWebService

We get the notorious INVALID_WEB_SERVICES_VERSION

So following the instructions from this site and the consultants we are working with, we changed it to use

https://our.host.name/api/services/xmatters-4.1.6

SM gets an error:

Error calling method: doSoapRequest in class:com/hp/ov/sm/server/utility/SoapClient Exception (com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.SOAPExceptionImpl: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.SOAPExceptionImpl: Invalid Content-Type:text/html. Is this an error message instead of a SOAP response?)

I am trying to track this down, is the xmatter-4.1.6 not giving the valid content type for SOAP?