Introduction:
The sun has come out today after experiencing the infrequent event of heavy snow in Tidewater, Virginia. So, now seems like a good time to get my first blog out for the year. And I want to revisit an old topic.
Favorite TIM Debugging Tools
From time to time, I get asked for a list of helpful tools for TIM debugging. Here are some of those utilities have found useful. The list is always changing. These should not be considered an official endorsement of the software by myself or CA Technologies.
1. APMscripts
The ultimate utility scripts created by Joerg Mertin to gather the all-important info to analyze TIM performance and health. You can get from https://github.com/CA-APM/cem-healthcheck-scripts . It is covered in APM Tech Tip -- The Missing Manual Part 3: Tim Monitoring 2 (apm-scripts)
2. TIM Logs with Trace options enabled . See APM Tech Tip: TIM Trace Options -- The Missing Pages Part 1 covers when to use which trace option.The same reference covers
3. Wireshark for network data quality issues including checking if there is two way traffic, SSL cipher suites, HTTP servers and statements, missing packets, etc..
4. Transaction Inspection for overlapping definition issues Resolving APM CE Business Transaction/Defect Count Issues talks about this. Seeing which definition matches will show if it is the one that you expect.
5. To split large pcaps by size or IP address, splitcap is invaluable
6. Wikidpad for my personal CEM knowledgebase. Useful for searches.
7. Agent Ransack for analyzing and counting strings in a log. Supports regular expressions.
8. timconfigtool or any xml viewer to read domainconfig.xml. It is covered in APM Tech Tip -- The Missing Manual Part 1: TIM Analysis, Monitoring, and Other Tools This is an internal tool
9. The TIM logs with SSL trace option on to see SSL cipher suites and SSL Decode errors (10.5 and later)
Questions for You:
- What other tools do you use for TIM debugging and for what situations?
- What other TIM topics do you want to see?