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1.0 CA SOI r3.2 Cumulative Update 1 Patch Introduction
2.0 Issue Fixes and Enhancements
3.1 How to Install the Patch (Typical Installation)
3.2 How to Install the Patch (High Availability Installation)
3.3 Merge Customized Files on the UI Server
3.4 Configure a Custom From Address for Error Notification Emails
3.5 Configure Help Desk Assignee Polling when Using the Universal Help Desk API
3.6 Exclude Device Name in Service Desk Help Desk Tickets
3.7 Configure Alerts Not Cleared on ServiceNow Tickets Closure in HA Environment
3.8 Create Notification Triggers in CA Service Desk Manager on Linux
This Readme contains information about the fixes and enhancements that are included in the CA SOI r3.2 Cumulative Update 1 patch (RO67863) and how to install, configure, and uninstall the patch.
This patch introduces the following fixes and enhancements:
Alert Management
If you select the root cause source as either Domain Manager or Combination and no domain manager provides a root cause analysis, then CA SOI determines the root cause. For more information about setting the root cause analysis mode, see the Administration Guide.
After you adjust the alert queue criteria, the alert counts in the alert queues are incorrect on open Operation Console. Close then restart the Operations Console. When the Java console is enabled, it shows an "IndexOutOfBoundsException" exception in a "LightWeightAlarmTableModel.applyBatchUpdate" method at the time the problem starts. The alert counts are now correct.
When attempting to create an alert queue and specifying the Attribute "Model type name" a null exception was thrown.
This is now corrected.
Previously, if you acknowledged an alert in an alert queue, CA SOI refreshed the alert table and the context changed to the top row.
The behavior is now corrected and the context does not change.
The Operations Console stops showing new alerts and opening a new Operations Console does not fix the problem. Checking the alarm repositories on the UI Server and the SA Manager shows differences. The SA Manager logs show a "ConcurrentModificationException." The UI Server logs show several repeated messages "checked: VIGILANT" and "checked: REMEDIAL" from an "AlarmModelSyncChecker" class.
Resolve the problem by accessing the UI Server debug page Synchronization Tests and run the "force" action for the alarm repository. For more information about the debug pages, see the Troubleshooting Guide.
Previously, when a low granularity service is impacted by an alert on an unmanaged sub-device item that belongs to a device in the service, the alert is inconsistently displayed on the Operations Console under the affected service.
The alert typically appears as you expand the service. However, sometimes the alert either does not appear at all or an alert appears that is unrelated to the selected service.
The alert now displays correctly.
Services with no alerts on them and normal Health status show an abnormal Risk status. The problem seems to occur after manually clearing open alerts (including service alerts) on the Operations Console. The service alerts clear before the infrastructure alerts that caused them.
This problem is now resolved.
The Time tab in the Escalation Policy editor includes various time-based criteria such as "Alert has not been assigned within _ minutes". The time criteria are not strictly based on the time that the alert occurred. The start time can reset in various situations: the SA Manager restarts, a service comes out of maintenance, or when a service enters business hours. This can produce unexpected results with the "Alert age exceeds..." field.
The alert age is now based on the true age of the alert.
Users previously did not see attributes in the properties table while editing an action.
The attributes now display correctly.
Previously, escalation actions that were executed on an alert in the Operations Console using Take Action" failed with the message "An internal error occurred on server..." On retry, the action typically succeeded. However, for some alerts, the actions fail with a NullPointerException in the "com.ca.sam.manager.escalation.ActionService" class. Subsequent retries also generally failed also.
The actions now function correctly.
Custom actions have been added to the right-click menu on configuration items. The actions that use AttributeID.NETWORK_ADDRESS work when executed on an item in the explorer tree, but do not work when executed from the same item in the Topology view.
These actions now work correctly.
Previously, if you made attribute changes to an enabled escalation policy, the Drools engine did not pick up new attributes.
The new attributes now work correctly.
Previously, when you opened the Operations Console on a computer with Java JRE 1.7.0_51, you received the message "Unable to launch the application." The details indicate "Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar."
An error no longer displays and the Operations Console opens correctly.
Help Desk Integrations
A help desk is integrated with CA SOI through CA Process Automation. The integration is configured to auto-clear an alert when a ticket is closed in the help desk product. Previously, the alert clear processing in CA SOI unnecessarily triggered a ticket close request, which fails in CA Process Automation because the ticket is already closed. This problem no longer occurs.
CA SOI r3.1 introduced an optional configuration of notification triggers in the CA Service Desk Manager. The procedure documented in the CA SOI r3.1 Readme that is now included in the CA SOI r3.2 Implementation Guide includes references to SDM installations on Linux, but the r3.1 patch only included scripts for Windows. The scripts for Linux were missing. The problem is now corrected.
CA SOI previously failed to create a CA Service Desk ticket on some alerts. When you take an action from the Operations Console, a "Create ticket error" displays stating that a character in the alert message is not a valid XML character. This is now corrected.
A CA Service Desk ticket create action uses the runtime parameter $MODEL_NAME to set the attribute "configuration item." A flag is checked to create the item in SDM if not found. This works for alerts on service or device items. But for subdevice items the CI created in SDM has a name <device name>:<instancename> instead of the expected <instancename>. This is now corrected.
CA SOI integrates with ServiceNow through CA Process Automation. While a ticketed alert is active, annotations sent from ServiceNow to CA SOI that exceeded the limit of 1024 characters were deleted. An "AlarmRepository: error writing alarms" error was logged in the SA Manager log files.
CA SOI now truncates the annotation rather than deleting it.
Previously, CA SOI annotated tickets with unnecessary text such as "[Ljava.lang.String;@7e284d67." The messages are related to escalation actions that attempted to create a ticket on an alert for which a ticket existed. However, the message is not related to any alert update on the ticket.
The unnecessary text no longer appears.
CA SOI is integrated with ServiceNow through CA Process Automation as Help Desk Manager. Alert southbound operations are enabled for alerts from SCOM. When an SCOM alert is cleared on the Operations Console, the alert is also cleared in SCOM. The help desk is configured to clear alerts on ticket close. Previously, when a ticket is closed in ServiceNow, the alert closed in CA SOI, but not in SCOM. The ticket now closes as expected in SCOM.
CA SOI r3.1 SP1 integrates ServiceNow through CA Process Automation. The integration is configured to close tickets in ServiceNow when alerts clear in CA SOI. Conversely, when a ticket is closed in ServiceNow, the alert should clear in CA SOI. However, if CA SOI was installed on a cluster, CA SOI did not clear the alerts when the ticket was closed in ServiceNow.
Initially, the virtual cluster name was configured as the CA SOI host in CA Process Automation. However, the tickets could not be created. Later, the configuration was changed to the primary node, and a second configuration added for the secondary node. This allowed ticket creation, and ticket closed on alert clearance. Nevertheless, the CA Process Automation workflow to clear an alert when the associated ticket is closed continued to fail.
Alerts now clear correctly when the help desk ticket is closed in ServiceNow.
Reporting
Only Risk affects a service; therefore, the service Health should match the service Risk. However, the pie charts for Health and Risk in CA SOI Reports previously had substantial differences, which are now corrected.
SA Manager
After running for some time the SA Manager restarts on its own. The jsw\logs\soi-mgr_wrapper log shows the following error:
"java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space"
Debugging showed a class loader leak in the Drools rule engine that indicated by unnecessary recompilation of escalation policy rules. This problem is now resolved.
You can perform a typical (non-high availability) installation or a high availability installation.
Patch all CA SOI systems, including CA SOI Reports:
Follow these steps:
Note: The installer will stop these services if you do not.
Note: The installer stops the CA SOI services before updating the CA SOI components. However, if you take the resources offline (using the Failover Cluster Manager) before running the installer, verify that the SQL server that runs the CA SOI database is online and running while the patch is applied.
Follow these steps:
Note: The installer will stop these services if you do not.
Note: Do not apply the patch to a passive node while the CA SOI resources are running on the active node.
Note: Select the Do not restart services option during the patch installation.
Note: Do not bring the CA SOI resources back online until you install the patch on the final node.
This patch updates several configuration XML files in the UI Server folder:
The patch moves your original files to the following folder:
SOI_HOME\Patches\Replaced\RO67863
Any customizations that you made to these files are no longer in effect unless you merge your original configuration files into the new files.
You can configure a custom "From" address for error notification emails.
Follow these steps:
SOI_HOME\jsw\conf\soi-manager.conf
wrapper.java.additional.11=-DENOTIFY_EMAIL_FROM_ADDR=email
The sequence number .11 is an example value and email is a valid email address.
Consider the following items:
If your help desk implementation does not allow you to obtain the current assignee of help desk tickets, configure the HDGetTicketProperty() method to return a value of "NA" or "null". The SA Manager ignores these values and retains the current assignee setting. For more information about this method, see the help desk configuration section of the Implementation Guide.
Use this procedure to exclude the name of sub-device configuration items as a prefix in Service Desk ticket actions.
Follow these steps:
SOI_HOME\jsw\conf\soi-manager.conf
wrapper.java.additional.11=-DSD_CI_USE_INSTANCENAME_ONLY=1
The sequence number .11 is an example value. The sequence numbers must be both consecutive and unique. Any lines starting with the number sign (#) are commented out and are not part of the sequence.
Example
A port with InstanceName soiserver:GigabitEthernet1/0/4. With the prefix, CA SOI created the item soiserver:soiserver:GigabitEthernet1/0/4. Now, without the prefix, the name is only InstanceName, such as soiserver:GigabitEthernet1/0/4.
If you installed the SA Manager on a cluster and you integrated CA SOI with a help desk product (such as ServiceNow) through CA Process Automation, use the cluster name in SSAServerConfiguration. For more information about SSAServerConfiguration, see the Implementation Guide.
Follow these steps:
SOI_HOME\jsw\conf\soi-manager.conf
wrapper.java.additional.11=-DSOI_HDM_HOSTNAME=cluster name
The sequence number of .11 is an example value and cluster_name is a valid cluster name.
Consider the following items:
If you have CA SOI integrated with a CA Service Desk Manager running on Linux, complete the Implementation Guide procedure "How to Create Notification Triggers in CA Service Desk Manager" with the following modifications:
This procedure mentions the file NotifySOI.sh. Put this shell script in place as part of Configure CA Service Desk Manager Notifications (below).
This is a message template update as mentioned in CA SOI Logging on High Availability Cluster Nodes. In this procedure, you may have to update the "Default Close Requested message template for request/incident/problem" template rather than the "Default Close message template for request/incident/problem" template.
Note: You should not have to edit ConfigSOI.sh. The script should find the JRE installed under $CASHCOMP. The script creates the file "soi_env.sh" rather than "soi_env.bat."
You run the BiConfig utility to upload the new reports.
Follow these steps:
SOI_HOME\Reports
BiConfig.bat -h "BOXI_host" -n "port" -u "boxi_administrator" -p "administrator_password" -f "samreports.xml"
Consider the following items:
You uninstall the patch from the command line or by launching the uninstaller with Windows Explorer. You uninstall the patch from all CA SOI components except the CA SOI reports component.
Important! Do not uninstall the patch from the CA SOI reports component. The patch updated the database and this cannot be undone. If you have a problem with reporting after you apply the patch, contact CA Support.
To uninstall the patch using the command line
SOI_HOME\Patches\Uninstall_SOIPatch_RO67863\Uninstall_RO67863.exe
To uninstall the patch using Windows Explorer
SOI_HOME\Patches\Uninstall_SOIPatch_RO67863\
All users must remove the newer patch files from the Java cache on the UI client systems.
Follow these steps:
Note: If you have a client that is connected to multiple CA SOI servers, right-click CA Service Operations Insight and choose Show JNLP File. You can then identify the server that each client connects to.
Contact CA Support
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