As part of the recent IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) 7.0.1 release, there are some serviceability-related items to highlight.

In Engineering Test Management (ETM), two new resource-intensive scenarios related to exporting to PDF or CSV were registered and documented. As scenario is considered resource-intensive if it is regularly known to drive sufficient load on an application potentially resulting in lower or inconsistent quality of service for end users. We document these scenarios and track their occurrence in the application logs and JMX MBeans.

As discussed in Monitoring Jazz Applications using JMX MBeans, one of our best practices for administering an IBM ELM deployment is to establish an enterprise monitoring strategy allowing administrators to proactively and reactively monitor the application environment. In this release we made some improvements in the documentation.

There is a new landing page for the documentation that is your gateway to pages for reference information, detailing the structure and content of the MBeans, and usage guides, providing help on how to make use of the MBeans to manage your ELM environment.

The reference guide for the common application MBeans has been revised to be fully generated from the application code, which will make it easier for us to make it more complete and keep it current new releases. The file comes as a downloadable zip archive containing the HTML pages describing the common application MBeans. Our first release of the new reference guide for the common application MBeans is now available for download. There are a few items that didn’t make it into that guide for this release which are being addressed in the next (see the New and Noteworthy section of the download page for details). Note that even though the file is for the 7.0.1 release, the information contained should be good back to version 6.0.6.1, since no additional common application MBeans were added since then.

We now have a reference guide for the MBeans added to the Global Configuration Management (GCM) application in 7.0.

Lastly, we created new usage guides related to collecting user, data and basic health check metrics and updated the usage guide for Monitoring your Engineering Workflow Management (EWM), aka Rational Team Concert cluster to add some additional details and clarifications.

For those just getting started with monitoring of your ELM environment, I encourage you to check out the overview and use the primer to establish a base set of MBeans to monitor. If you are already using MBeans, I’d appreciate your feedback on the improvements; check out the usage guides and let me know of additional content needed.

Tim Feeney
Executive IT Architect, IBM Engineering