BMC Remedy rapid release

BMC has kind of started a rapid release schedule for AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT. That means that some parts will get new releases every 3 months and some parts every 6 month. This is great, to see fixes and quality improvements. But I can not really see anybody running a full ITSM/SmartIT stack to be able to upgrade at this speed.

Anyway, as of 4th of September 2018 18.08 is out. And the parts of 18.05 that was not generally available was made available. 18.05 contains some big changes which need some thought before you move forward.

BMC is trying to move all parts into this new version schema. So all products in AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT should have the same version number. The version number is YY.MM of the release. But so far AR System/Atrium/ITSM is called with the old version numbers, which in 18.05 is 9.1.05. So still not fully in sync. But the documentation is using the new version numbers. 18.05 already have a bunch of patches.

From 9.1.05 the old RPC based ARAPI used from C is officially out of support and not updated. So the changes in AR System that is in 9.1.05 is only supported in the Java version of ARAPI. One of those changes is menu type to get license info that is needed in the new license management.

Other new things is a console to more easy access configuration and status of a server group. And more or less even a standalone server is treated as a server group. The biggest problem at the moment with the server group config is that some of the config is in raw database tables that you can only access with database tools if you need to fix something. And you will need to fix something for sure.

The file deployment is now the way to patch the system. And in 9.1.05 there are new enhancement to work better for CMDB and ITSM. One of the most important thing about file deployment is that you have to have the file deployment service running on all servers. And you have to make sure the AR System Monitor form contains all the servers with correct info, and only the correct servers. Of curse to make this work you have to have firewalls open so the server doing the deploy can access all the servers.

SmartIT/MyIT/Digital workplace is now more separate, and your URLs will change. But still on same server. MongoDB is gone. And there is probably more things that I am missing. But this is my first take on this.

Problem with BMC Remedy Service Desk

A customer complained about the server where crashing. Nobody could explain why. But I noticed that in the console output it complained about the libIMFilterPlugin.so. After searching around a little I found a Technical Bulletin from BMC saying that there is a problem running BMC Remedy Service Desk integration together with BMC Remedy Service Level Management (SLM), on linux and AIX platforms. What?? On the other supported platforms it is working, but not on linux and AIX. The bulletin is from October 2007.

OK, this seem to be the case with version 7.1.00, 3.0.02 and 3.0.00 of the Integration for BMC Remedy Service Desk (IBRSD). The bulletin is actually about not being able to start IBRSD together with SLM. But I guess that this is part of why the server is crashing. And it might actually be part of some inconsistencies at the customer. I wonder if this is fixed in some patch. The bulletin say change OS or disable one of the components as workaround.

Patch 2 for AR System 7.5 released

I know, late again. It has been available for a few weeks already. Both server and mid-tier had quite a lot of fixes. I wonder how many bugs still there. Many of the fixes on the server were about memory leaks.

So today I finally installed a test server with 7.5 patch 2. It is Windows 2003 server with MS-SQL 2005 and IIS. I installed server, mid-tier, development and user on the server for testing. There was no problem with the installation. And I actually like the new java based installation. I just hope it can run in console mode on linux so you do not need to install X. Patch 007 for ITSM 7.0.003 did not want to run in console mode.

A quick check that everything was working showed that everything installed just fine. And I was surprised that import tool was change to something based on eclipse. That is nice, I hope. The old tool really sucked.

So now I just have to work with the thing to see what is new. I already know what is new in ARAPI. One thing is added parameters for error handling in active links, even if it is not there yet. And then also the dynamic joins query. I have to try that one.

Patch 7 for AR System 7.1 released

OK, not today, but 3 weeks ago. The list of fixes is quite long. But after a little longer look it was not so many for the kind of systems I normally encounter. Most notably was a fix that is supposed to speed up the start of the server when you have big applications, like ITSM. And though still not fast on startup it is faster then the pre patch 7 systems.

In admin tool there is also a performance fix. And I think I have noticed the better performance. But still, when you have 21000+ active links on a server, admin tool just suck, even if I do not have details on. When I use ARGetListActiveLinks() in my own programs I get 21000+ active link names in like under a tenth of a second. It is hard to see exactly how long it take just from output from a console program without real timing, but still alot faster then admin tool. So what does admin tool really do if you only want to list the names that makes it so slow.

Migrator is actually slower then admin tool to handle the list of objects. Try ctrl-a on 21000+ active link and take a coffee brake for 10+ minutes. Actually, making the diff on 21000+ active links goes faster. And still migrator does not always handle the number of fields in a table correctly. So expect to still get currupted tables. I guess it only happens if you only migrate selected fields, not full form. But I do not feel safe in how migrator do things. And the table problem is not corrected by just migrating the form again. You have to force a 'recreate' of the table. Or hack the database.

User tool have lots of fixes that makes you wonder, does user tool really work? And in 7.1 I have seen to many problems to be surprised when I find new once. It is hard to develop anything when the intended client does not follow the rules of the application system.

Mid-Tier is not so much better then user tool. But for some reason I have lately found the web function better then user tool. Even if things like shortcut keys work in the web version of the client.

So far I have not investigated what really make my patch 6 installation make e-mail engine use 100% CPU. Is it the not so update 1.6.0_02 JRE or something else. But on my patch 7 system e-mail engine is running nice with JRE 1.6.0_13. It is just sitting in the background when it should. Have to see what happens when you put some load on the system.

OK, so there you have some sign of life from me. A totally non-scientific observation of the latest patch for AR System 7.1. Hope I have something more interesting to write soon. Some hard facts.

One little thing about ITSM, is it OK for an action to take 8 seconds on a modern application server. OK, it is not a super fast database, but only searching for the active links when opening Incident Manger Console takes 8 seconds if you do not have it cached. Which mean on a development cache server it always takes forever to use the ITSM applications.