IBM Control Center 6.1.1 Release Notes

Content

Release notes contain last-minute changes and other important product information. Read this document before you install IBM® Control Center V6.1.1 or upgrade IBM Control Center to V6.1.1.


System requirements

Before you install or upgrade IBM Control Center, see Hardware and software requirements for IBM Control Center. If you are upgrading to IBM Control Center V6.1.1 and need to determine your database and engine sizing, you must request a Server Sizing Study from your IBM Professional Services Project Manager or an IBM Sales Executive.

For information about configuring databases that are used by IBM Control Center, see Creating and setting up databases.

Required operating system patches

IBM Control Center uses the IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence server V11.0.5.0 as the reporting engine. Install required operating system patches for the Cognos Business Intelligence server before you install IBM Control Center. Required patches can be found at Cognos Business Intelligence 11.0.5 Supported Software Environments.

Important: Go to the Cognos Business Intelligence server web site for required libraries. In addition to those listed, the following libraries are also required in a Linux® environment: libstdc++.so.6, libX11.so.6, libXau.so.6, and libXdmcp.so.6. Contact your Linux system administrator for more information.


APAR fixes

For information about fixes for IBM Control Center, see Fix Central.


Contacting IBM Software Support

If you encounter a problem with this product that cannot be resolved using the information outlined in the documentation, contact IBM Software Support. See Contacting IBM Software Support.


Migrate existing EVENTS data to Sterling B2B Integrator tables

IBM Control Center V5.4.2 introduced new tables specifically to capture Sterling B2B Integrator activities. If you monitor Sterling B2B Integrator servers and you are upgrading from a release prior to IBM Control Center V5.4.2, run the convertB2BData utility. This utility migrates data previously stored in the EVENTS table to where it is stored now in the following tables: Sterling File Gateway activity (FG_STATS_LOG), protocol activity (AF_STATS_LOG), and business process activity (BP_STATS_LOG). If you monitor Sterling B2B Integrator servers and you are upgrading from IBM Control Center V5.4.2 or V6.0, you do not need to run the utility because the utility runs automatically.

Important: Run the migration utility after you upgrade your IBM Control Center instance, while the event processor or event processors are stopped. To ensure that you can successfully run Sterling B2B Integrator or Sterling File Gateway reports for data that was collected before the upgrade, run reports only after the data migration is complete. Depending on the volume of your data, the migration utility can take several hours to complete the migration process. It is best to run the migration utility on a test or development environment before you run it with production data. You can view the data in the Completed processes view in the web console. See Migrating EVENTS table data to Sterling B2B Integrator activity tables.

General considerations

IBM Control Center V6.1.1 has the following general considerations:

• Support for the following operating systems is discontinued in V6.1.1:
• Solaris operating system
• SUSE Linux operating system
• When you install IBM Control Center on the AIX operating system with the ./CCInstall64.bin command, you might receive the following message:

/bin/sh: : cannot open
Launch the installer with the following command:
/bin/bash ./CCInstall64.bin
• TLS 1.2 can be used to secure all connections between IBM Control Center components, such as between event processors (EPs) and Cognos Business Intelligence, between EPs and Web servers, between EPs and IBM Control Center consoles.
• On a Microsoft Windows® platform, after you upgrade IBM Control Center V6.0.0.1 with a secure connection to Cognos Business Intelligence to V6.1.1, to enable the secure connection to Cognos Business Intelligence on IBM Control Center V6.1.1, run the configCC.bat -cognos command and enable the secure connection again.
• The typical time to install and configure IBM Control Center V6.1.1 is one hour or less (Sterling B2B Integrator tables migration time is not included).
• IBM Control Center can run in a virtual machine environment provided that enough resources (memory, processing power, and storage) are allocated to the virtual machine.
• If the console loses connectivity to the event processor, it attempts to reconnect to the event processor every 30 seconds until it reconnects, or until you exit the console.
• If you are not able to access the IBM Control Center launch page URL after upgrading to IBM Control Center V6.1.1, ensure that the URL is included in the browser list of trusted sites.
• If you do not enable the globalization parameter for the Microsoft® SQL server during an IBM Control Center installation or upgrade, then you cannot use multi-byte characters. When a multi-byte character is used without enabling this parameter, IBM Control Center event processors cannot be started, and you must manually remove the character from your database. If you choose to enable the globalization parameter at a later time, then you must reinstall IBM Control Center.
• If you want to secure event posting to the event repository, run the configCC utility and enable event authentication for the Event Repository. Events posted are going to then require valid credentials.
• The installation of a specific root pass phrase can be secured using a user-defined key instead of a system key. For more information, see Securing the IBM Control Center root passphrase with a user key.
• In a high availability environment, you can install and configure a load balancer to evenly distribute IBM Control Center web console sessions to the web servers, or the events of a dynamically discovered server that are posted to the IBM Control Center event repository.
• When you compare the performance of an IBM Control Center V6.0 single engine with the performance of an IBM Control Center V6.1.1 single event processor (formerly the engine), the IBM Control Center V6.1.1 event processor requires 20% more CPU capacity to process the same volume. You can have delays in event processing on any event processor that is running at more than 80% of the CPU capacity. To prevent delays, you can increase the number of available CPU cores by 20% for those event processors running at more than 80% of the CPU capacity. You can also install more event processors and spread the load.
• Before you upgrade your IBM Control Center V6.0 instance that uses IBM DB2 V10.1 or V10.5 to IBM Control Center V6.1 or later, two of the existing tables need to be moved to bigger table spaces for a successful upgrade. The tables need to be moved because schema upgrade scripts add new columns to the CC_USER and CC_SERVER tables. When new columns are added, the table width becomes larger.

Prerequisites for upgrading IBM Control Center V6.0 with DB2 V10.1 or V10.5 to IBM Control Center V6.1 or later
Run the following DB2 Move command for the CC_USER and CC_SERVER tables to move the tables to bigger table space:
CALL SYSPROC.ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE('<schema>',  '<table_name>',  '<data_table_space>',
'<index_table_space>', '<lob_table_space>', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 'MOVE')
Attention: 

• <data table space>, <index table space>, or <lob table space> must be a 16K or 32K table space.
• To run these commands, you need to have the database administrator privilege.

Examples:
CALL SYSPROC.ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE('SCCPROD', 'CC_USER', 'TS_REG16_SCCPROD',
'TS_REG16_SCCPROD', 'TS_REG16_SCCPROD', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 'MOVE')

CALL SYSPROC.ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE('SCCPROD', 'CC_SERVER', 'TS_REG16_SCCPROD', 'TS_REG16_SCCPROD', 'TS_REG16_SCCPROD', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 'MOVE')


Upgrade considerations

If you have IBM Control Center V5.2, V5.3, or V5.4, first upgrade to IBM Control Center V5.4.2.2, and then upgrade to V6.1 or later by following these steps:

1. Stop the running IBM Control Center instance.
2. Upgrade IBM Control Center to the latest V5.4.2.2 iFix package (download from IBM Fix Central).
3. Run the ConfigCC utility and make sure IBM Control Center 5.4.2.2 is working properly.
4. Make a copy of the install/conf directory of the V5.4.2.2 system, and back up your databases in case that you need to go back to the earlier version.
5. Shut down the upgraded V5.4.2.2 instance.
6. Upgrade IBM Control Center to V6.1 or later. See Upgrading IBM Control Center from a previous version in the IBM Control Center Knowledge Center.
   

Important: In V5.4 and earlier, rules, SLCs, actions, servers, and other objects are stored on the operating system in XML Files. In V6.1 and later, these files are migrated to the client databases. Tell your database administrator that the database might drastically increase in size, depending on the number of servers, user-written rules, SLCs, actions, and other objects.

Known limitations

IBM Control Center has the following limitations:

• IBM Control Center 6.1.1 does not support validating the Init Parm options that are introduced with IBM Sterling Connect Direct V5.3.
• The messages.log file on the WebSphere® Application Server shows the time stamps of log messages in coordinated universal time (UTC) instead of the local time.
• If you are running IBM Control Center with many data visibility groups (DVGs) configured, you might experience a decrease in IBM Control Center performance. To improve the performance, you can either disable some of the DVGs or add more CPUs.
• When you upgrade from a previous version of IBM Control Center to V6.1 and have a database schema change, you cannot access widgets in a group workspace on the GRC tab. You must remove the widget from the workspace, and drag it back onto the workspace to access it.
• In the IBM Control Center web console, if the monitor views, such as completed file transfers, completed processes, queued processes, active alerts, or handled alerts, have more than 3 million table entries, then you should not use the search filter. If you use the search filter, then the response time can be long, and the web console might time out. When the web console has a time out, you can receive an error that the user interface is out of sync. To avoid the long response time and time-out error, select a specific server type or decrease the range of the date and time sliders.
• When you are working with tag mapping in IBM Control Center web console, if the criteria are set for some numeric fields, and you enter a non-numeric value, a window is displayed with the message "A system error has occurred".  To resolve this issue, enter a numeric value in the fields.
• The IBM Control Center web console does not support defining rule IDs with GB18030 characters, such as Mongolian, Tibetan, and Arabic characters. Server names or descriptions might be displayed incorrectly if they contain GB18030 characters.
• Microsoft SQL databases limit a single index to a total length of 900 bytes. When the total length of the proc_id, proc_name, orig_node, and server_id fields exceeds 900 bytes, the PROC_ID, PROC_NAME, and ORIG_NODE fields of an incoming event are shortened to 145 characters respectively in the EVENTS table of IBM Control Center.
  The 900 bytes total length limitation of a single index in Microsoft SQL databases causes the REMOTE_FILE_NAME and LOCAL_FILE_NAME fields of the CC_FILE_TRANSFER table (or the completed file transfers view) to be shortened to 200 characters.
  Shortening the characters can affect IBM Control Center V6.1 Service level criteria (SLCs), metadata, or tag mapping when you identify an exact matching condition for the proc_id, proc_name, or orig_node field when the field contains more than 145 characters, or for the remote_file_name or local_file_name field when the field contains more than 200 characters.

The following options are a solution to this limitation:
• Specify a shorter proc_id, proc_name, orig_node, remote_file_name, or local_file_name field if it can be configured.
• Use a matching condition such as "contains" or "start with" instead of exact matching.
This limitation does not apply to IBM DB2 or Oracle databases.
• When an event from a server triggers a linked rule, but the event processor that the server is assigned to stops before the event processor takes the linked rule resolution action or non-resolution action, neither of the actions is taken. Processing of the linked rule is stopped and not taken over by remaining event processors.
• IBM Control Center currently cannot override the time zone for the monitored Sterling Connect:Enterprise® servers. Thus, the generated Sterling Connect:Enterprise transaction data in IBM Control Center still uses the original time zone that is set by the Sterling Connect:Enterprise server.
• Some alerts with message CSLC047E (Did not start by NSRs) are left in the Active Alerts list even when the SLC meets one of the following criteria:
• The workflow SLC with calendar schedule is in progress and the workflow SLC fails over to another controller event processor
• The workflow SLC with calendar schedule is in progress and the only active event processor in the IBM Control Center cluster is restarted
• If you use IBM Control Center V6.1 to monitor Sterling B2B Integrator V5.2.5 Hotfix 10 or later, duplicate entries for Sterling File Gateway activities might be generated in the completed process view. The duplicate entries occur because Sterling B2B Integrator V5.2.5 Hotfix 10 or later sets the FileGatewaySendMessage,  FileGatewayReroute, and FileGatewayRoutePGPUnpackageDocument business processes as non-system business processes, which exposes the events to IBM Control Center and causes duplicate entries.
  The following steps are a resolution to this issue:

1. From the server list of the IBM Control Center console, right-click the Sterling B2B Integrator server and select Properties. The Server properties window is displayed.
2. On the Settings tab, click BP List.
3. In the business process list, clear the check boxes for FileGatewaySendMessage,  FileGatewayReroute, and FileGatewayRoutePGPUnpackageDocument.
4. Click OK and then Update.
• Users with the personal workspace permission might not be able to save the personal workspace when all of the following conditions are met:
• The Cognos Business Intelligence server is installed on at least two IBM Control Center event processors.
• The primary Cognos Business Intelligence server is stopped and the standby Cognos Business Intelligence server is active.
• A user with the personal workspace permission is created when the standby Cognos Business Intelligence server is active.
To avoid this issue, complete the following steps:
1. Restart the primary Cognos Business Intelligence server with the startReportServer.bat command on Microsoft Windows or the startReportServer.sh command on Linux. Then stop the standby Cognos Business Intelligence server with the stopReportServer.bat command on Microsoft Windows or the stopReportServer.sh command on Linux.
2. After the primary Cognos Business Intelligence server has reinitialized, restart the standby Cognos Business Intelligence server.
3. Delete and re-create the user that was created when the standby Cognos Business Intelligence server was active.
4. Log in to IBM Control Center as the newly created user, modify the workspace, and save it in the web console.
• IBM Control Center might stop monitoring Sterling B2B Integrator servers or other servers, and show an unknown status in the web console if the following conditions are met:
1. In a high availability environment, a stopped event processor is restarted.
2. The controller event processor starts reassigning monitored servers to the started event processor.
3. Before the server reassignment process is completed, the user stops the controller event processor.
To avoid this issue, you should wait for all of the server reassignments to complete before you stop the controller event processor.
If you encounter this issue, you can manually reassign the affected server to another event processor in the cluster after another event processor becomes the controller event processor. After the server is reassigned and starts monitoring, you can assign the server back to the original event processor.
• If you pause monitoring for a server, the processes of the server is going to remain in the queued processes view. If you resume monitoring the server from the pause point, the completed processes in the queued processes view are moved to the completed processes view when they are complete. However, if you resume monitoring the server from the current time, completed processes might remain in the queued processes view if the process end events are missing. To remove the completed processes from the queued processes view, manually delete the entries one by one.
  Attention: Processes that are manually deleted in the queued processes view are not going to appear in the completed process view and the process activities are not going to be reflected in the dashboard.
• IBM Control Center cannot monitor Sterling B2B Integrator servers using IPv6. You must specify an IPv4 address or a DNS name for the connection.
• When you access the web console, you might notice that portions of the UI are not visible in high contrast mode, to avoid this issue, do not use high contrast mode.
• The configCC utility does not update the system-wide administrator email address in existing actions. After you update the email address in the configCC utility, go to the IBM Control Center console or web console to access the existing actions that are configured for email notification and manually change the email address.
• When you import a configuration into an existing instance of IBM Control Center in Windows using the configCC utility, the service name is not updated to include the name of the imported event processor. Instead, the service name includes the name of the original event processor at the target instance. You must manually import the conf folder and install a new instance to create a new service name with the new event processor. Create a target installation folder for a new IBM Control Center instance, copy the conf folder that you want to import to the planned install location, and then install a new instance of IBM Control Center.
• DVG criteria that specify server groups do not match events that are produced by servers in those server groups. As a result, events that should trigger those DVG rules and SLCs do not trigger them. Users who are limited to the data that matches those DVGs do not view anything in their IBM Control Center instance. You can resolve this issue in the following ways:
• Change all DVG definitions that contain server groups in their criteria to specify each individual server in those server groups.
• Define a role that is restricted by a server group, without a DVG.
• Daylight Saving Time rules for Brazil are not correct for 2009 and beyond. A fix is available to address this problem by allowing the user to add or update time zone definitions. See Changing event processor settings after installation for help configuring time zone definitions.

Known limitations for Cognos Business Intelligence servers

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence server has the following limitations:

• You can receive an error about a widget in your personal or group workspace not responding to prompts, or a widget loading with overlapping data results. These errors can occur because there is a large volume of data in your workspace. To avoid these errors, you need to further tune your Cognos Business Intelligence server to handle the amount of data.
• You might not be able to run a report in the IBM Control Center console or web console during the Cognos Business Intelligence server failover if it is not complete. Run reports only after you can view the workspace in the web console.
• If you open a report that is generated by the Cognos Business Intelligence sever in the Microsoft Excel 2002 format by using a later version of Excel, you can get a warning that the file format does not match the file extension. When asked if you still want to open the file, click Yes to continue viewing your report. The document is not impacted by the warning.
• If you cannot access the personal or group workspace in Internet Explorer 11, try the following options to work around this limitation:
• Use a web browser other than Internet Explorer 11, such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
• Add your internal network domain or IP address into the Internet Explorer allowlist. In Internet Explorer 11, select Internet options > Privacy > Sites > Allow and add your internal network domain or IP address.
• Use the hostname or IP address that you configured in the configCC utility or the GUI Installer to access the IBM Control Center console, web console, and your workspaces. For example, if the IP address is configured, access the web console by IP address, and then access your workspace.
• Access your workspace from another event processor. In addition to the owner of the active Cognos Business Intelligence server, an administrator can check the address of the active Cognos Business Intelligence server owner from the CC_SERVER table.
• If you cannot save the workspaces in Internet Explorer 11, try one of the following options to work around this limitation:
• Use a web browser other than Internet Explorer 11, such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
• Set Document Mode to 9 in Internet Explorer, then save your workspace. To set the Document Mode:
1. In Internet Explorer, press F12 to access Developer Tools.
2. Click the Emulation Mode tab, and then select 9 for the Document Mode.
3. A prompt appears. Click Leave page to refresh the page.
4. When finished, close Developer Tools to revert the Document Mode to the default setting.
• Update User agent string to Internet Explorer 9.
• If you receive the following error, you might be running a Cognos Business Intelligence server that is configured with DB2 10.5 in Oracle compatibility mode:
  
  CM-CFG-5063 A Content Manager configuration error was detected while connecting to the content store.
  CM-CFG-5114 An error occurred while locking the content store database. Cause: Assignment of a NULL value to a NOT NULL column "TBSPACEID=4, TABLEID=5, COLNO=0" is not allowed.. SQLCODE=-407, SQLSTATE=23502, DRIVER=3.69.24  Stack trace: com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.SqlIntegrityConstraintViolationException: Assignment of a NULL value to a NOT NULL column "TBSPACEID=4, TABLEID=5, COLNO=0" is not allowed.. SQLCODE=-407, SQLSTATE=23502, DRIVER=3.69.24     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.gd.a(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.gd.a(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.gd.a(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.yo.b(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.yo.c(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.t4.bb.l(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.t4.bb.a(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.t4.p.a(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.t4.wb.b(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.zo.qc(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.zo.b(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.zo.ic(Unknown Source)     at com.ibm.db2.jcc.am.zo.executeUpdate(Unknown Source)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.CMPreparedStatementBase.executeUpdate(CMPreparedStatementBase.java:264)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.StatementProxy.executeUpdate(StatementProxy.java:321)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.CMDbConnection.executeUpdate(CMDbConnection.java:585)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.CMDbStoreMultipleCMsUtil.checkCMLockConsistency(CMDbStoreMultipleCMsUtil.java:1027)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.CMDbStoreFactory.initContentIndependentBeforeLock(CMDbStoreFactory.java:2021)     at com.cognos.cm.dbstore.CMDbStore.initializeContentIndependentBeforeLock(CMDbStore.java:4370)     at com.cognos.cm.server.CMServlet.initializeContentStoreContentIndependentBeforeLock(CMServlet.java:2122)     at com.cognos.cm.server.CMServlet.init(CMServlet.java:1881)     at com.cognos.cm.server.ContentManager.start(ContentManager.java:436)     at com.cognos.cm.server.ContentManagerLifecycleHandler.start(ContentManagerLifecycleHandler.java:65)     at com.cognos.pogo.services.DefaultHandlerService.start(DefaultHandlerService.java:88)     at com.cognos.pogo.services.DispatcherServices.startInitialService(DispatcherServices.java:418)     at com.cognos.pogo.services.DispatcherServices.startInititalServices(DispatcherServices.java:404)     at com.cognos.pogo.transport.PogoServlet$PogoStartup.run(PogoServlet.java:803)     at com.cognos.pogo.util.threads.SafeThread.safeRun(SafeThread.java:70)     at com.cognos.pogo.util.threads.SafeThread.run(SafeThread.jav 
  
  To resolve this issue, turn off Oracle compatibility mode with the following steps:

1. To check whether DB2 is running in Oracle compatibility mode, enter the following command: db2set -all. If you see the registry variable DB2_COMPATIBILITY_VECTOR=ORA, then DB2 is running in Oracle compatibility mode.
2. If DB2 is running in Oracle compatibility mode, then stop the IBM Control Center event processor.
3. Disable DB2 from running in Oracle compatibility mode by entering the following command: db2set DB2_COMPATIBILITY_VECTOR= . Press Enter.
4. Verify that DB2 is not running in Oracle compatibility mode by entering the following command: db2set -all. If you do not see the registry variable DB2_COMPATIBILITY_VECTOR=ORA, then Oracle compatibility mode is successfully disabled.
5. To restart DB2, enter the following command: db2stop force. Then, enter the following command: db2start.
6. Start your IBM Control Center event processor.
• If the Cognos Business Intelligence server is in a non-high-availability environment, it might not be able to run reports on an IBM DB2 or Oracle database. A network failure might cause this issue. To resolve this issue, restart your IBM Control Center event processor so that the Cognos Business Intelligence server can reconnect to the IBM DB2 or Oracle database.
  The following log messages in the Cognos\logs\pogo.log directory indicate a successful connection; if you cannot find the log messages, the connection might fail:
  <<Date & Time Info>> INFO [core.ehcache.pogo.EhCacheDispatcherHandler] Timer-24: Registered mbean: com.cognos.pdc:type=pdcMbean
  <<Date & Time Info>> INFO [core.ehcache.pogo.EhCacheDispatcherHandler] Timer-24: CacheManager 'PDC' STATUS_ALIVE

<<Date & Time Info>> INFO [core.ehcache.pogo.EhCacheDispatcherHandler] Timer-24: Cache: 'CAM_Grid.PassportMap' size=0, status=STATUS_ALIVE

IBM Control Center functionality by server type

If a product or platform is not listed in the following chart, then it is not supported by IBM Control Center. See the Detailed System Requirements for supported products and platforms. The following table lists IBM Control Center functionality broken down by server type:

Product, platform, and release	Monitor activities	Monitor configuration changes	Monitor health	High Watermark Report	Process goes to Hold Queue	Process Interrupted Events	Sterling Connect:Direct certificate authentication
Sterling Connect:Direct for z/OS version 5.2 or later	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for i5/OS version 3.8 or later	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for UNIX version 4.2 or later	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Direct for HP NonStop 3.6 or later	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Sterling Connect:Direct for Microsoft Windows version 4.7 or later	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sterling Connect:Enterprise for z/OS version 1.5 or later	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling B2B Integrator version 5.2 or later	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling File Gateway version 2.2 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
MQ MFT version 9.0 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Express for UNIX version 1.5 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Express for Microsoft Windows version 3.1 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling Connect:Express for z/OS version 4.3 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Global Mailbox version 1.0 or later	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sterling Secure Proxy version 3.4.3 or later	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No