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Create a Diagnostic Provider

 

Use Diagnostic Providers to query the startup configuration, current configuration, and current state of a diagnostic domain. Diagnostic Providers also provide access to any self diagnostic tests that are available from a diagnostic domain. To complete this task have programming knowledge of your system and the proper authorities to perform the following steps.

 

Overview

The steps that follow outline a general process for creating Diagnostic Providers (DP).

 

Procedure

  1. Determine your diagnostic domain. Look for configuration MBeans that control a similar domain in the same component. Extending an existing configuration MBean with a DP interface avoids proliferation of new MBeans and has the benefit that mapping from a diagnostic MBean to a configuration MBean requires no additional information.

  2. Determine what configuration attributes you want to expose. Include information that is used to configure your component from the configuration MBeans.

  3. Determine what state attributes you want to expose. Anything you might want to know about the state of your component for troubleshooting can go here.

  4. Determine what self diagnostic tests you will expose.

  5. Determine what test attributes you will return for each self diagnostic.

  6. Create your DP registration XML file.

  7. Create your DP implementation.

    1. To see an example, refer to Implementing a Diagnostic Provider and keep in mind that most things that a Diagnostic Provider should do are already done for you in the DiagnosticProviderHelper class.

    2. To ensure that you do not collect unwanted data, add hooks in your component code where collect state data using the DiagnosticConfig object.

    3. Add hooks in your component code where store or be able to access configuration data.

  8. Add code to register your DP implementation. Typically, the best place to do this is where your component is initialized.

  9. Add Diagnostic Provider IDs (DPID) to your logged messages. Registering a DPID with a logger makes that information available in any messages logged with this logger. This enables fast paths in the DP utility to function on this particular Diagnostic Provider.

    1. Register your DPID with your loggers (for any of your loggers that you only want to associate a single DPID with).

    2. When you use multiple DPIDs with the same Logger, you can (instead of registering a single DPID with a Logger) add DPIDs to individual logging calls in the parm[0] position. Do not put {0} in the corresponding localized messages. It is bad practice to print the DPID in your messages as this would be inconsistent with messages from loggers with statically assigned DPIDs.



Best Practices for Diagnostic Provider Extensible Markup Language

Best Practices for choosing a Diagnostic Provider name

Implementing a Diagnostic Provider

Creating a Diagnostic Provider registration XML file