Automic Automation 12.3.2 Released

[David Ainsworth]

The Automic Automation 12.3.2 Service pack has been released and is available for download.

Automic Automation 12.3.2 - Bug Fixes, Known Issues and files are available for download here.

Refer to our compatibility_matrix for minimal version requirement.

Product Lifecycle information is available here - Product Lifecycle

Please note, you will need to sign into the download center to be able to download the file.

Automic Product Management

[e-mail]

 

[Pete Wirfs]

12.3.2 includes a bug fix for forecasting.  I will be investigating this fix as time permits, but if someone beats me to it, please let us know if the forecasting bug fix corrects all of its problems, or just some of its problems.

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Pete
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[Thierry Tarrason]

Hi Pete,
For us, Forecasts got corrected but not Autoforecast. I alreday opened a ticket and am waiting for a response from support.

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Best regards,
Thierry

Banque de Luxembourg
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[Carsten Schmitz]

Hi,

@David Ainsworth, is it possible to get details on some of the fixed bugs, but especially this one:

"Writing to performance tables cannot be turned off."

Is this in reference to PERFORMANCE=N, did that not work? Or something else? This would be very relevant to us.

Thanks!

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[Pete Wirfs]

@Carsten Schmitz   The downloads center incudes a "bug fixes" pdf that you can download for yourself.  But sometimes this documentation does not tell you everything you'd like to know about a particular bug fix!

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Pete
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[Carsten Schmitz]

@Pete Wirfs I did exactly that, and that's where that line is from. That's all there is though, no more details there.

[David Ainsworth]

Hi @Carsten Schmitz​
yes that is directly related to that issue.
Now if you specify "PERFORMANCE=N" it does not collect the data

cheers
David

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Senior Product Line Manager - Automation
CA Technologies, A Broadcom Company
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[Carsten Schmitz]

​Hi @David Ainsworth,

thanks for the speedy clarification!

At the same time, please note that this causes troubles we'd rather not have. This telemetry currently has no direct value for us. When introduced, it (or, based on best guesses, what we consider to be "it") has already ballooned our database and negatively affected our performance. At the time table PMMAV had ballooned to over 15M records on our test system and much higher on production (I think it was 60M at some point). I only noticed this when I went to investigate major performance issues reported by the user base. I think PMMA and PMMAV are related to telemetry? Just a guess though, as I could not find these tables in the DB documentation. This indirectly contributed to one downtime, the DBA needed to tweak settings to deal with the table growth.

Setting the (unfortunately named) PERFORMANCE=N did seem to lower the number of records in this tables in 12.3.1., PMMAV it currently down to 2M records on "test" and "prod" alike. So I was under the impression this was probably working?

If it's not, we'll need to do push another update through the dev/test/prod chain asap and expose the user base to another update in short time, which as you know isn't an easy sell.

Broadcom needs to get better at QA (automated functional testing) at least with the new features, and include more quality detail in the release notes.

Best regards,
Carsten

[David Ainsworth]

Hi @Carsten Schmitz
some answers and clarifications

PMMAV and PMMA are not linked with telemetry

The performance metric tables are not linked to telemetry. These features are independent.

The telemetry data does not contain any performance metrics.

Was PERFORMANCE=N already "working" correctly?

It worked partly. With PERFORMANCE=N the entries are not written to the metric tables but they are collected in memory.

With the fix, the memory will not grow over time.

Without the fix the setting PERFORMANCE=N could lead to a termination of the Java server processes (caused by an out of memory error) if the system runs long enough.

What is the value of the performance data to the customer?

We can more easily identify performance problems with this additional data if a customer decides to share it with us.

​cheers
David

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Senior Product Line Manager - Automation
CA Technologies, A Broadcom Company
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[Carsten Schmitz]

​Hi David,

thanks for clarifying. Yes, I used the terms Telemetry and Performance Data Gathering synonymously in error. I meant the performance monitoring part.

Based on what you say and my observations, I guess PERFORMANCE=N did stop the data collection (part or whole), but some data remains that is not being cleaned up. We'll upgrade to 12.3.2 and see where we end up with these tables.

It would still be nice to get them added to the documentation. I heard the "friends" of PERFORMANCE=N are also still queued for being added to documentation, so we'll see.

Cheers,
Carsten

[Christian Boeck]

Hi @Carsten Schmitz,
short question, what do you mean by "friends" of performance=n ?

PERFORMANCE_KEEP_DAYS and PERFORMANCE_CLEANUP_BATCH_SIZE ?

or are there any more "friends" I didn't noticed yet?
​​

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Thx & rgds
Christian
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[Carsten Schmitz]

Hi @Christian Boeck,

Sorry for the late response, I was absent.

​​PERFORMANCE_KEEP_DAYS and PERFORMANCE_CLEANUP_BATCH_SIZE ?

Yes, those are the one's I know of. If there are more beyond those, I wouldn't know about them :)

[Christian Boeck]

o.k. thx @Carsten Schmitz, then we talk about the sam undocumented and hidden parameters :-)
​​​​

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Thx & rgds
Christian
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[Keld Mollnitz]

Hi @David Ainsworth,​

I just checked the PMMA and PMMAV tables in our 12.3.1 env (preprod). PMMA contains 9.5M rows and the PMMAV contains more than 95M rows.Could this be contributing to the overall poor performance we are experiencing in our V12 Preprod env or are "only" JCPs/JWPs impacted ??
Should I raise a Support case on this ?

/Keld.

[Pete Wirfs]

I have received notification from support that 12.3.3, to be released March 31, is going to have additional forecasting fixes.

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Pete
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[David Ainsworth]

Hi @Pete Wirfs
​yes a fix for "Autoforecast remains in status preparing" is currently planned for that Service Pack.
NB Service pack content is always subject to change.

cheers
David


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Senior Product Line Manager - Automation
CA Technologies, A Broadcom Company
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[Thierry Tarrason]

Hi @David Ainsworth ,
Do you have a date of when that fix should be available? We are eagerly waiting on this.
​​​

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Best regards,
Thierry

Banque de Luxembourg
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