Tips on the ITM Agent for Maximo (product code MI )

I recently found the Tivoli Monitoring Agent for Maximo 7.1.1 Feature Pack and wanted to share some tips on using it. You can find the Feature Pack (with downloads) here:

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?q1=itm&rs=3214&uid=swg24025477&context=SSLKT6&cs=utf-8&lang=en&loc=en_US

The instructions for installing the agent assume that you have Maximo, your ITM TEMS and ITM TEPS all on the same Windows machine, which I imagine would not be the case for most customers. You *can* install the TEMS and TEPS support on a non-windows machine using the following commands:

installIraAgentTEMS.sh /opt/IBM/ITM


installIraAgentTEPS.sh /opt/IBM/ITM

Where the first parameter is your ITM install directory. You can then install just the agent on a Windows machine with:

installIraAgent.bat C:\IBM\ITM

The agent itself is ONLY installable on Windows. However, this can be ANY Windows machine you want - it only needs to be able to access your Maximo server via URL. NOTE: The agent does get some information from the Log file dir that you specify; if you install the agent on a machine that is not your Maximo server, this data will not be available. (I'm not certain exactly what information it gets from the logs.)

A BIG caveat of the agent is that you CAN NOT use it if you have configured Application Server Security for authentication and authorization with Maximo. (I didn't test out the scenario of configuring Application Server Security only for authentication due to time constraints). So you can only use the agent to monitor a Maximo installation that is configured to use Maximo security.

The next tip has to do with configuration. When you configure the agent, you're required to provide a few pieces of information:

Instance Name: Do NOT use "maximo" as the value! I found this out the hard way - it simply doesn't work if you do this. I used "MXServer", but it looks like you can use anything OTHER than "maximo".

Log file dir: This is the location of your application server log files. For example:

/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/ctgAppSrv01/logs/MXServer

Port: This is the port you use to access Maximo. The default is 7001, which is the default http port for WebLogic. If you're using WebSphere, you should change this to 9080 for http access (or 9443 for https).

Java Home Directory: This can be set to any Java 1.5 (or above) install location on the system. I set mine to:

E:\IBM\SMP\sdk

Another tip is that you do NOT need to configure Maximo Performance Monitor for the agent to work.

The last tip is on usage, once you get the agent up and running. Let it run for a several minutes before assuming it's not working correctly. It just takes a few minutes to capture some of its data. Once it up and running correctly, the table in the Performance Object Status workspace should look similar to this:



SysInfo SysInfo ACTIVE NO ERROR
DataBaseInfo DataBaseInfo ACTIVE NO ERROR
InstalledApps InstalledApps ACTIVE NO ERROR
License License ACTIVE NO ERROR
InstalledProducts InstalledProducts ACTIVE NO ERROR
DBConnections DBConnections ACTIVE NO ERROR
MemGaugeForAllSrvrs MemGaugeForAllSrvrs ACTIVE NO ERROR
RuntimeMXBean RuntimeMXBean ACTIVE NO ERROR
Memory Memory ACTIVE NO ERROR
MemoryGauge MemoryGauge ACTIVE NO ERROR
MBOCountGauge MBOCountGauge ACTIVE NO ERROR
UPSGauge UPSGauge ACTIVE NO ERROR
CronTasks CronTasks ACTIVE NO ERROR
EscalationErrorLog EscalationErrorLog ACTIVE NO INSTANCES RETURNED