Consolidating Reporting of HPE Shadowbase Log Activities: A TIC Software Client Business Case Study

Client business case studies are always the most interesting to the NonStop community and vendors alike. Recently, we at TIC Software had the pleasure of documenting an especially interesting system challenge and subsequent solution by a long-time client in the payment processing sector. Their goal was to create a comprehensive view of HPE Shadowbase log activities on both Production and DR systems.

Background:

The client had recently acquired the HPE Shadowbase product to synchronize its NonStop production database with the one on its DR system. The HPE Shadowbase logs provide detailed information on the status of the different components, as well as the progress of the replication process on both systems. As this particular client’s database  involves many hundreds of files processed on a daily basis, manually monitoring the different logs across two nodes could prove to be very time consuming. Instead our client automated the process using tools from TIC Software and a simple custom COBOL program.

The Tools:

TIC LogWatch – which captures EMS log messages and looks for Shadowbase events to capture. Subsequently, captured events on DR system are sent via TCP/IP to the Production System.

TIC IPLogger – which enables the TCP/IP Server to accept incoming socket messages and log to the same file as Production Shadowbase event logs.

TIC TeleMail – which takes log data and HTML code to generate HTML email.

Additionally, our client developed a simple custom-built COBOL program (which can be made available to anyone upon request).

The result: 

A daily email is generated, which reports all HPE Shadowbase activities in an easy-to-understand format for Operations.

As the screen capture indicates, all EMS messages are brought together from both Production and DR systems in a single error log.

The red text are errors, the light grey background is from Production, and the medium grey background is from the DR machine.

The events reflect a significant pause, which indicates a new event.

The line numbers down the side make it easy to speak over the phone with HPE support when referencing a message.

The START and STOP messages are hardcoded displays, based on AUDMON going up or down.

For further  information please feel free to contact TIC Software –

Ryan Ly

TIC Software

60 Cuttermill Rd.

Ste. 412

Great Neck, NY 11021

516.466.7990

ryan_ly@ticsoftware.com

www.ticsoftware.com (TIC Company Site)

http://blog.ticsoftware.com (TIC Talk Blog)