TSM Operational Reporter
From Tecniq
What is TSM Operational Reporter:
TSM Operational Reporter is a little known reporting tool used with TSM, and is only available for the Windows platform. It takes about five minutes to install, another five minutes to configure, and produces a fairly useful customisable report straight out of the box.
How you use it:
Simply install the tool on a Windows machine and on the tree down the left of the screen, right click "Tivoli Storage Manager" and "Add TSM Computer...". Enter the details of your TSM server to monitor. Then go to "Server_Name>Server1>Reports" within the tree and right click on Operational Reports and add a new report. The default settings give you a good idea of what the reports are like, however you can change scheduled times for the report to be run, define email addresses to have the report mailed to, or create custom SQL statements to create more specific queries.
The reports themselves are fairly self explanatory and highlight any issues that may need addressing in red as well as making recommendations, ideal for daily monitoring.
Issues to watch out for:
The operational reporting service uses four worker threads to run reports and monitors. If a worker thread starts a report and the session to the TSM server hangs, then that worker thread will remain unavailable. If that happens four times, the worker thread pool will be depleted, and no more reports will be generated nor email sent until a session completes.
One thing that will cause a session to hang between the TSM server and a worker thread is an expired admin password. When the password of an admin account used with operational reporting expires, the TSM server will prompt for a new password. Operational reporting currently does not handle this interaction and the session hangs. The hang is cleared after the session is cancelled on the TSM server, or the wzrdhlpr process associated with the session is ended (via task manager, or the kill command).
Logs to look out for are in C:\Program Files\Tivoli\TSMconsole, and are called dsmerror.log, TraceReportSvc.txt and LogReportSvc.txt.
The TraceReportSvc.txt may contain messages such as;
11/04/2009 09:35:36 # 740 # setting3.cpp # 2699 # sn_opts: Could not open registry key: SOFTWARE\IBMADSM\CurrentVersion\Console\Centiq_TSMServer1\Monitor
This just means that no Monitor process has been defined as yet, and can be ignored. Alternatively a inactive monitor can be created to remove this message.
Note you can only create 62 different reports simultaneously, which is normally enough for most practical environments.
TSM Operational Reporter is actually being replaced within TSM version 6.1 by Tivoli Common Reporting, which is a more general reporting tool. People preferring Operational Reporter may want to consider an alternative product called "TSM Manager".
