BMC Patrol on OpenVMS

[Dave Gudewicz]

Just wondering if anyone here is using BMC Patrol for OpenVMS and what issues/problems you might have come across.

TIA,

Dave...

[Ian Miller. · Accepted solution]

I did on VAX/VMS V6.2. The unfourtnate tasked getting it to work did eventually get the part for reading log files to work but cursed it soundly. I have not seen it since.

[Dave Gudewicz]

I saw the icon that represents "the magical answer" on this very short thread.

Can this be removed?

Dave...

[Jan van den Ende]

Dave,

you might ask that again in the Forums Issues forum, but I fear it will not be done:
assigning at least one answer 8, 9, or 10 points, or closing the thread, automatically assigns the "Bunny".

Proost.

Have one on me.

Jan

[Bart Zorn_1]

We are using BMC Patrol for OpenVMS as part of the Enterprise wide implementation of Patrol on all platforms. The implementation on OpenVMS is poor and requires a lot of resources. Most things are done as DCL procedures running from a FTA device. MONITOR CLUSTER is used a lot which leaves a lot of VPM* process behind.

We use it only for application monitoring because for system management we have our own tools (AMDS, WATCHDOG, Console Manager).

Regards,

Bart Zorn

[Ian Miller.]

Bart, if Patrol runs multiple copies of MONITOR on the same system then that will impact system performance badly. This was improved in VMS V8.2 MONITOR.

[Tom O'Toole]

BMC patrol sounds like a real winner!

[Bart Zorn_1]

Ian,

> Bart, if Patrol runs multiple copies of MONITOR on the same system then that will impact system performance badly. This was improved in VMS V8.2 MONITOR. <

That may be the case, but it will take a while for us to upgrade to 8.2 (if ever).

Talking to BMC about issues like this has given us mainly the respons "just trust us, we know what we are doing". Yeah, right.

[Ian Miller.]

If you can get Patrol to run one copy of MONITOR then that is ok. The real impact is running multiple copies of MONITOR.

[Bart Zorn_1]

Ian,

There is nothing that we can do about it. BMC is the one to implement improvements, but they do not seem to be interested.

But thanks anyway!

Bart

[Dave Gudewicz]

An update.

Installed Patrol v2.6 on a 7.3-1 Alpha system yesterday.

Tried starting it and it complained about licensing. OK, I read the VMS installation manual and it says that PATROL products are installed with a 30-day demo license. The installation program automatically set up the license files on Windows and Unix platforms.

Odd that the VMS installation manual doesn't mention what happens wrt licensing on VMS. I called BMC and gave them the page # of the error.

They then told me that they would send me the procedure for getting a license loaded on VMS.

Other item of interest.

They say early and often to remove SET TERM/INQUIRE on any account that will work with Patrol.

Installation procedure (from the manual):

@sys$update:instal patrol026

They forgot "vms" in front of "instal"

They also forgot, or are not aware of PCSI, but that's a whole 'nother story. :)

[Ian Miller.]

your progress report does not inspire confidence that Patrol has got any better :-)

[Dave Gudewicz]

Another update.

There was a new version of Patrol for OpenVMS released about a month ago. Its now at v2.7. Included support for IA-64 and a few other things.

Dave...

[Bill Hall]

Dave,

I haven't had the pleasure of meeting the Patrol agent, but I have had the misfortune of meeting BMC's Control-M and Control-SA agents (enterprise job scheduling and user account maintenance/password synch respectively).

BMC wants to manage their agents from dedicated accounts. Accounts with lots of privileges. The accounts need privileges because the LOGIN.COMs they provide for the management accounts might include installing known images, defining logical names in the system table or enabling network services. It took a bit of hacking on the startup, shutdown and login procedures to make the agents fairly safe to use by a non-privileged user account. Our schedulers and security folks are not operating system savy if you know what mean and could be dangerous with privileges. They are more data entry/data maintenance types.

BMC's support of clusters is rather interesting also. I guess thats what you get with cross platform applications, the very lowest common demoninator.

I've also found it to be very difficult to get these issues acknowledged and fixed by BMC.