Tools for troubleshooting and diagnostics

A number of tools and resources are available to help you troubleshoot issues and resolve problems that users might encounter while using IBM® WebSphere® Portal. If you need further assistance, you can use the tools described here to identify and collect information to help IBM Support determine the underlying cause of a problem.

IBM Support Assistant
IBM Support Assistant (ISA) provides quick access to product, education, and support resources that can help you answer questions and resolve problems with IBM software products on your own, without needing to contact IBM Support. Different product-specific plug-ins let you customize IBM Support Assistant for the particular products you have installed. IBM Support Assistant can also collect system data, log files, and other information to help IBM Support determine the cause of a particular problem.
Data collection and symptom analysis
There is one method to collect data and analyze symptoms for problem determination scenarios. You run a task that can collect and optionally send the data for you.
Portal version and history information
You can use the IBM WebSphere Portal version and history information tools to gather information about your portal installation. This information can be useful when you need a snapshot of your portal installation specifics, for example when you contact customer support. This information is automatically included in the automated data collection that is available when you use the IBM Support Assistant Lite for WebSphere Portal.
Logging and tracing
If you are experiencing a problem, you might want to enable tracing and then re-create the problem to capture more log information. You can enable logging and tracing for software that is shipped with WebSphere Portal. Enabling tracing makes log output more verbose. For example, you can enable tracing within WebSphere Application Server to obtain information about application servers and other processes.

Parent topic: Troubleshooting

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