IBM ISA MustGather : Using IBM Support Assistant Lite (ISA Lite)

If you are fortunate enough to have IBM support , often you will be raising a PMR – Problem Record (IBM).

IBM uses a tool called  ISA lite very similar to Oracle RDA.  ISA(IBM support Assistant) can be used as client application on server itself or as a client-server application where client is nothing but ISA agents installed on IBM platform.  Here is what I did for my websphere 6.x ND server.

Download IBM Support Assistant Lite (ISA Lite)/Assistant Workbench from MustGather: Application Server, dmgr, and nodeagent start and stop problems

I downloaded “ISALiteForWebSphere_Unix_09162010.tar” for my Linux WAS ND 6.x.

Installing the Tool

In all cases, installation of the IBM Support Assistant Lite tool is simply a matter of extracting the files from the archived .zip file that you generated and transferred from the Workbench system. The files can be extracted to any file system location you choose on the system where you will be running the tool. This will create a subdirectory ISALite under your target directory.

Tool Usage

Setting the JAVA_HOME Environment Variable
Regardless of whether you will be using the IBM Support Assistant Lite tool in GUI mode or in command-line console mode, you use the same procedure to start it: you invoke the appropriate launch script from a command line.  In the case of a Windows system, these launch scripts are batch files.  For the other environments, they are shell scripts.

Since the tool is implemented as a Java application, it is necessary that Java can be located before the tool can start. If Java is not
available on the PATH, you will have to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable manually.
The IBM Support Assistant Lite tool requires a JRE at the level 1.4.2 or higher (1.5 or higher on Windows 7 64 bit), so you must first make sure that a suitable JRE is installed on the system where the tool will be running. If it is, then you will need to issue an operating-system-specific command to set the JAVA_HOME variable to point to this JRE. The Microsoft JVM/JDK and gij (GNU libgcj) are not supported.

For example, if on a Windows platform you have jre1.4.2 installed at c:\jre1.4.2, you would set JAVA_HOME using the following command:

SET JAVA_HOME=c:\jre1.4.2

NOTE: Do not use quotes in the value of the SET command, even if your value has whitespace characters.

On a Linux,, if you have the JRE installed in /opt/jre142, you would set JAVA_HOME using the following command:

was61@ jre]$ export JAVA_HOME=/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/java/jre
[was61@ jre]$ pwd
/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/java/jre
[was61@ jre]$ cd bin/
[was61@ bin]$ ./java -version
java version “1.5.0”
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build pxa64devifx-20080908 (SR8a + IZ29767 + IZ30684 + IZ31214 + IZ31213))
IBM J9 VM (build 2.3, J2RE 1.5.0 IBM J9 2.3 Linux amd64-64 j9vmxa6423ifx-20080811 (JIT enabled)
J9VM – 20080809_21892_LHdSMr
JIT  – 20080620_1845_r8
GC   – 200806_19)
JCL  – 20080908a

Starting the Tool in Swing GUI Mode

You will need to issue the following launch script:

– For the Windows environment, it will be the runISALite.bat script in the tool’s \ISALite directory.
– For the Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris environments, it will be the runISALite.sh script in the tool’s /ISALite directory. Make sure that the runISALite.sh script has execute permission; you can use the
following command to give the file execute permission: chmod 755 runISALite.sh

The GUI mode is not supported in the iSeries and zSeries environments: see the section immediately following this one for information on how to start the tool in command-line console mode on iSeries and zSeries.

Starting the Tool in Command-Line Console Mode
If a GUI is not available, the tool should start in command line mode automatically.  If console mode is desired even if a GUI is available, specify “-console” on the command line.  In some instances, it will not be possible to determine that a GUI is not available and the tool will not start.  In these instances, the tool will need to be restarted using “-console”.

Files are written to the installation directory
By default, the ISA Lite installation directory is used for storing files created during execution.  On some systems, the ISA Lite installation directory will be read only.  In this instance, use the -useHome parameter.  This parameter will cause temporary files to be written to the systems temporary directory and persistent files written to the user home directory.

On how I used this tool see details at ISA Log.

If you explode zip file, you will see something similar as below collected by this tool.

C:\IBM Support Asst >tree /f
Folder PATH listing

C:.
├───autopdzip
│   │   autopd-collection-info.xml
│   │
│   └───autopd
│       │   inventory_rcf.xml
│       │
│       ├───log
│       │       autopdsetupinstance2011.01.24-13.48.59.615+0000.log
│       │       isalite-error0.xml
│       │       isalite-error1.xml
│       │       isalite-error2.xml
│       │       isalite-trace0.xml
│       │       isalite-trace1.xml
│       │       isalite-trace2.xml
│       │       Log_Viewer.xml
│       │       Trace_Viewer.xml
│       │       Viewer_Translations.js
│       │
│       └───wasexporter
│               Dmgr.websphere.configuration
│               Dmgr.websphere.log
│
├───Dmgr
│   ├───Server1_Cell
│   │   │   cell.xml
│   │   │   resources-cei.xml
│   │   │   resources-pme.xml
│   │   │   resources-pme502.xml
│   │   │   resources.xml
│   │   │   security.xml
│   │   │   variables.xml
│   │   │   virtualhosts.xml
│   │   │   ws-security.xml
│   │   │
│   │   └───Server1_Manager
│   │       │   node-metadata.properties
│   │       │   node.xml
│   │       │   serverindex.xml
│   │       │
│   │       └───dmgr
│   │               server-cei.xml
│   │               server-pme.xml
│   │               server-pme51.xml
│   │               server.xml
│   │
│   ├───logs
│   │   │   activity.log
│   │   │   wsadmin.traceout
│   │   │   wsadmin.valout
│   │   │
│   │   ├───dmgr
│   │   │       native_stderr.log
│   │   │       native_stdout.log
│   │   │       startServer.log
│   │   │       stopServer.log
│   │   │       SystemErr.log
│   │   │       SystemOut.log
│   │   │       SystemOut_11.01.21_22.15.08.log
│   │   │
│   │   └───ffdc
│   │           dmgr_0000000a_11.01.24_14.04.17_0.txt
│   │           dmgr_exception.log
│   │
│   ├───properties
│   │       sas.stdclient.properties
│   │       sas.tools.properties
│   │       sslbitsizes.properties
│   │       wsadmin.properties
│   │       wsjaas.conf
│   │       wsjaas_client.conf
│   │
│   └───tranlog
│       └───Server1_Cell
│           └───Server1_Manager
│               └───dmgr
│                   └───transaction
│                       ├───partnerlog
│                       │       log1
│                       │       log2
│                       │
│                       └───tranlog
│                               log1
│                               log2
│
└───WAS_General_Problem
│   aim-meta-data.html
│   aim-meta-data.xml
│   autopd-collection-environment-v2.xml
│   collector.jar
│   historyReport.html
│   levelreport.html
│   SizeOfCollection.txt
│   versionReport.html
│
├───Debug
│   ├───config
│   │       user_settings.txt
│   │       was-server-status-filled.jacl
│   │       was-start-status.txt
│   │       was-status.txt
│   │
│   └───jacl
│           was-filled-trace-restore.jacl
│           was-filled-trace.jacl
│           was-user-defaults-filled.jacl
│
└───PortChecker
profilePortChecker.html_PASS.html