CA Workload Automation Autosys Edition (AE) Office Hours Transcript (Feb.12th)

[Chris_Stallone]

Lenn Thompson - CA :

Good morning, @Jim. Thanks for joining. We'll get started here in just a couple minutes.

 

 

Jim Spath :

Great.  I only see you, Chris, and Mike Woods.

 

 

Michael Woods :

Hi Jim, yes quiet this morning

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

There is another CA call that is just wrapping up. I think we'll see more team members joining. Hopefully some more customers too.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

Okay, everyone. Thanks for joining us this morning. What questions do you have for our CA Workload Automation AE team?

 

 

Jim Spath :

Maybe off-topic, but: I saw moderation has been switched on in the CA Community site.  As I am a moderator on the SAP community site, I know too well the issues of combating spam. The SAP managers asked if we could have a conversation about best practices. On their site, point "cheating" is also a big issue.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim Yes. We had to turn moderation on for newer (low-point) users temporarily. We are hopeful that we'll be able to turn moderation off (or mostly off) by the end of the week.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim we are still sorting through some of the remnants  a spam attack last week.

 

 

Jim Spath :

The spammers will continue to test your defenses.

 

 

Jim Spath :

More on topic, we plan to install 11.3.6 SP1 only after getting 11.3.6 Incremental 1 Cumulative 1. I also found there is a patch required for WCC to work with SP1. Has anyone rolled out SP1 and what challenges did you find?

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim and that's why we may never be able to turn moderation completely off, unfortunately.

 

 

Mike :

Currently running Autosys 11.3.1 on unix and EEM/WCC 8.4.411 on windows 2003. Currently configuring EEM/WCC on windows 2008 for migration  2003. Can WCC/EEM be configured to point to Autosys 11.3.1 at sametime as 2003 is?

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - I only know of a partner that has been testing SP1.  No reported problems.  The WCC patch is there to take advantage of the new status job attribute.

 

 

Jim Spath :

I know we are not supposed to discuss specific support cases, but a couple pain points we have are WCC views, and EEM policy management through dev/prod. Are there good troubleshooting guides people use for WCC and EEM?

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Mike - As long as you install the components on supported OS's, they will be able to work together.

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike - unless you install them in a different order than expected, in which case AutoSys agents and application servers are a pain.

 

 

Jim Spath :

(I can send that case # offline ;-) )

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - If the problem is the policy itself, then I normally use the permission check and check teh debug box.  That gives me the polices that are checked and the group membership.

 

 

Jim Spath :

It looks like Windows Server 2012 R2 is suported now - just a few months late for our platforms.

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike it is not policy as such, it is comparing policies between dev and prod EEM servers.

 

 

Jim Spath :

When I export to XML, sometimes I can compare, but sometimes the order is rearranged, making a diff more challengin.

 

 

Jim Spath :

/imng/

 

 

Jim Spath :

/challenging/ (sorry)

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - got it.  Do you have multi-write setup between them or are they seperate?

 

 

Jim Spath :

Dev and prod are totally separate EEM instances (and we have a sandbox for patch practice).

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - we can set up a call afterwards, but I'd need to know what method you currently use.  Develop in Dev and the export/edit/import or create in each one?

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike - create in each one. The challenge I have is simply comparing the two. The only method I know is to use the XML dumps.

 

 

Jim Spath :

Back to the CA Community - is there a dashboard view of "Ideas" for AutoSys?  I have created a few (ahem) and need to manually check them for progress.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim Are you getting emails about your ideas? When they are edited or commented on?

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Lenn I suppose; not quite sure. I don't think I get notified when someone votes, but what I'm asking about is a higher level view of what Ideas are proposed, how many votes, and the review status.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@jim You can also get an overview of all of the content you've via your profile page (content tab) https://communities.ca.com/people/webmaster_jim/content

 

 

Jim Spath :

I went ahead and created an Idea summary for my suggestions.  But what about those proposed by others?

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim: If you want just Autosys, you can go to this page: https://communities.ca.com/community/ca-workload-automation/content?filterID=contentstatus%5Bpublished%5D~category%5Bca-autosys-edition-ae-workload-automation%5D

 

 

Jim Spath :

This page is what I get for my own ideas, using Jive menus:

 

 

Jim Spath :

https://communities.ca.com/content?filterID=contentstatus%5Bpublished%5D~objecttype~objecttype%5Bidea%5D

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@jim: Which is just the main content page under the WA community, then filtered by content type (ideas) and then picking a category (AE)

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim Could you email me a screenshot of that page? What I see is MY content by those filters -- so it's different  what you see.

 

 

Jim Spath :

I am at 7 pages and counting for AE Ideas.

 

 

Jim Spath :

Nitin seems to have me on # of suggestions. ha.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim Yes. Nitin has been keeping on top of them of late as well.

 

 

Jim Spath :

I wonder how many ideas are duplicates...

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim I'm not sure, but that's for Nitin and team to sort though

 

 

Jim Spath :

@lenn - a summary would help me decide where I need to vote.  Looking at 7 pages of ideas one by one is time consuming.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

@Jim Understood. Will explore what options we might have there.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

Do we have any other questions related to AE?

 

 

Jim Spath :

one more - we need to stop a few hundred agents next week for a storage patch. Any best practice for agent health checks / management, (pending the new version)?

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - One of the changes for 11.3.6 is to start writing messages to the log when an agent sends health messages to teh scheduler.

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike - that is for disk space threshold only right?

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - you can configure the agent for example to send alerts when it starts running out of disk space.  Warning, Critical settings and one other level that escapes me

 

 

Jim Spath :

(because when the "health" topic was previewed, I had different ideas about what that implied)

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - The agent also sends messages to 'known' managers when it starts and when it shuts down gracefully.

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - What type of info are you looking for?

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike - "health" to me implied performance metrics like response time, CPU and memory usage, error log analysis, etc.

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - Some of that can be obtained  the agent using SNMP get or JMX get attribute type functionality

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike but day-to-day operational starting and stopping agents is  problematic for security reasons - need to be root/admin on the server, and stopping/starting en masse is not supported natively (yet).

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike what is JMX?

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - JMX = Java Management Extension

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - Agent configuration will enable it.

 

 

Jim Spath :

@Mike - OK will research that. Thanks!

 

 

Michael Woods :

@Jim - I'll send you some info

 

 

Jim Spath :

I found this link... http://support.ca.com/phpdocs/0/allprod/NA/CA_AutoSys_WA_Beyond_Unix_and_Windows_Agent_Technology_Application_Services_and_DB_Agents.pdf

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

We have a few minutes left. Anything else, @Jim? If not, we can wrap up a couple minutes early!

 

 

Jim Spath :

I'm good. Back to the ticket queue.

 

 

Lenn Thompson - CA :

Thanks for joining, Jim. Talk to you soon!