GLF Viewer

GLF (BOBJ logs) utility was added to BiWhy mainly for E2E (end-to-end) traces, but it turned out to be very helpful for normal or HIGH level traces too.

Problem:

BOBJ doesn’t start after restoring from the backup.

Error message: CMS DB is not available.

Troubleshooting:

• Checked CMS DB – it is up.

• Pinged and queried from DB Client from BOBJ host – works fine.

• Captured HIGH-level logs for CMS, opened in BiWhy, and because it nicely automatically groups calls we immediately see that all CMS DB call is taking ~10 sec just to bring 100 objects.

Hence the problem is in the DB driver configuration.

Of cause, you can come to the same conclusion by going through the flat file in “Flexible Log Reader” (one of the best otherwise) just spending more time, more efforts, and being less certain with the overall picture.

And what if a case (logs) is more complex?

Configuration check

To avoid surprises all nodes, and servers should be configured alike unless differences are introduced intentionally.

That is why BiWhy provides several ways to compare configurations including automated checks where possible.

Though automated checks are not flawless.

Problem:

Intermittent issue. More than half of users are getting errors, while others don’t.

Quick search by the error message brought among others: “…problem of unknown origination, probably connected to FIPS…”

It is perfect when an error message univocally defines the root cause, but those problems are usually fixed in the early stages and rarely reach us.

Other messages are either too general or might have multiple root causes, so the lead above could be just another red herring.

Not mentioning that it is uncertain about FIPS, doesn’t explain how to test and what is FIPS anyway?

But before moving further, type FIPS in BiWhy to check the configuration, and hurray! It is a flag and it is on some servers but not on others (missing for the whole host, as it is SIA parameter).

Read more about FIPS, restart SIA with FIPS flag, and the problem is solved.

The analysis took less than an hour.

BiWhy flow: it didn’t detect the absence of the flag (it should be either off or on everywhere), but it provides a convenient interface for the quick check!

CMS DB to Excel

Analyze query in table and export to excel

Problem:

Exporting CMS DB query results to excel is challenging, though it is covered by some third-party tools.

What about exporting one-to-many relationships?

With BiWhy 24.70.43 version, you can do it in a few clicks.

1. Run query. If you don’t know which one, use BiWhy help/query examples/CMS DB snapshot

2. Browse through available properties. If don’t already know which one to use

3. Select fields to export to the table or use * to get everything from the query

4. Select a field with multiple values, if you want to flatten one

   • Not flattened field: shows a list of values

   • Flattened filed: a new row is created for each entry

Export to Excel, if needed.

See User/User-Group example below. The table has a row for each valid combination of user and user group.

BOBJ has 113 specified parent-child relationships (BOBJ-specific SQL syntax), which produce one-to-many results.

See some on the screenshot.

Parent/child example:

SELECT … FROM … WHERE parents("SI_NAME='Service-Server'", "SI_NAME='NODE001.EventServer'")

SELECT … FROM … WHERE children("SI_NAME='Service-Server'", "SI_NAME='AuditingService'")

Plus there are many other dependencies, which you can find in properties, for example, User/Recent Documents, …

Now all of it can be easily analyzed or exported, of cause, it is handy to export simple properties too.