CA Service Management

  • 1.  CA Tuesday Tip:  Refresher on the Support Diagnostic Tool

    Posted Apr 29, 2013 11:19 AM
    Hello All, I hope everyone who went to CA World had a great time and learned some great new things! This week I want to do a refresher on a utility that CA Support has been using for several years, which was rolled into Service Desk 12.7 out of the box. Its called the Support Diagnostic Tool. Its a great utility that gathers a great amount of information including system info, logs, history files, mods, and much more - and compiles it into one file that can be uploaded to a CA Support issue for an engineer to download and analyze to troubleshoot the issue. You can execute the tool on both the primary and on any secondary servers, and upload all the output to any support issue that you open - this will save a lot of time as the CA Support Engineer will not have to come back to you asking for different things as everything will be right at their fingertips.

    SO for those of you who are on 12.7 - here is how it works:

    1. On a command line, navigate to NX_ROOT\diag\bin
    2. Run the command supp_diag
    3. Type "y" and hit enter to agree to the license
    4. Type "y" and hit enter to tell the utility to create an MSINFO32 output
    5. The system will now run all the commands used to gather the appropriate information and compile it into one file named with the hostname and date/time the capture was done, ending with the ".CAZ" extension - the output file will be located under the NX_ROOT\diag\rpt directory
    6. Upload this CAZ file to your support issue
    7. Repeat for each secondary server in your environment

    For those folks NOT on 12.7 just yet - fear not!! You can also use the tool as well - here is how you can install and use the utility:

    The following link contains a CA Tech Doc on how to download, install and use the tool in versions that are previous to 12.7:
    https://comm.support.ca.com/?legacyid=TEC469212

    Going forward, I would like to enoucourage all of our customers to please utilize the utility on all versions of Service Desk as it will save both you and the CA Support Engineer a lot of time in getting started working on your issues as all the needed information to get started will already be in our hands - thus we avoid the need to go back and forth mutliple times asking for things. That said, occasionally there may be times where additional items may be needed, at which point a CA Support Engineer would give you specific instructions on whats needed and how to get it.

    Thanks to all, and have a great week!!

    Jon Israel
    Principal Support Engineer
    CA Technologies


  • 2.  RE: CA Tuesday Tip:  Refresher on the Support Diagnostic Tool

    Posted Apr 30, 2013 03:04 AM
    Thanks Jon. An important topic.

    I fixed a typo in the instructions: Step 1 location changed to "\diag\bin."

    TIP: It is best to add this to your "PATH" statement so that you may run "supp_diag" from any location.

    TIP: Log file "<<SERVERNAME>>_supp_diag.log" created in the \diag directory.

    TIP: Make sure that your FTP account is set up to clear very large files with the .CAZ extension, before you need it.

    TIP: Extract the resulting .CAZ file and examine the contents. I look at this output every week in my line of work, and it is one of the best places to get comprehensive performance information. Of course, reading it is a different skill, but start out with an understanding of the pdm_vdbinfo, pdm_webstat, pdm_status and of course \stdlogs.

    Thanks, Kyle_R.


  • 3.  RE: [Tuesday's Tips] RE: CA Tuesday Tip:  Refresher on the Support Diagnost

    Posted Apr 30, 2013 09:16 AM
    Thanks Kyle!

    Just as a side note – for those folks using Linux… the tool will work for you as well – but the slashes will be the other way ;) So under NX_ROOT/diag/bin, or “opt/CA/Service Desk Manager/diag/bin”

    As Kyle mentioned – this should be added to the path variable for easy and quick runability ;)

    Jon Israel
    [color=#f00101]ADMIN:[color] Kyle_R. 2013-05-10. Removing email chain as included above.


  • 4.  RE: CA Tuesday Tip:  Refresher on the Support Diagnostic Tool

     
    Posted May 09, 2013 01:38 PM
    Thanks for all great info guys! :lol: