Tools for troubleshooting and diagnostics
There are a number of tools and resources available to help you troubleshoot issues and resolve problems with this product. Some of those are described here. Since IBM WebSphere Portal runs with the IBM WAS, additional troubleshooting tools and techniques are described in the WebSphere Application Server documentation. These tools are intended to assist you in understanding how to best operate the solution, and how you might solve problems you and the users may encounter along the way. Should you require further assistance to resolve these issues, the tools described here will help us to identify and collect information which will be helpful when you do report these issues to IBM Support.
IBM Support Assistant
The IBM Support Assistant (also referred to as ISA) is a free local software serviceability workbench that helps you resolve questions and problems with IBM software products. It provides quick access to support-related information along with serviceability tools for problem determination. Use the IBM Support Assistant to help you in the following ways:
- To search through IBM and non-IBM knowledge and information sources across multiple IBM products to answer a question or solve a problem
- To find additional information through product specific web resources; including product and support home pages, customer newsgroups and forums, skills and training resources and information about troubleshooting and commonly asked questions
- To extend the ability to diagnose product specific problems with targeted diagnostic tools available via the Support Assistant
- To simplify collection of diagnostic data to help you and IBM resolve the problems (collecting either general or product/symptom specific data)
- To help in reporting of problem incidents to IBM Support through a customized on-line interface, including the ability to attach the diagnostic data referenced above or any other information to new or existing incidents
Finally, we can use the built in Updater facility in IBM Support Assistant's to obtain IBM Support Assistant upgrades and new features to add support for additional software products and capabilities as they become available.
For more information, see the Installation and Troubleshooting Guide.
Automated Problem Determination Tool
WebSphere Portal is supported by the WebSphere Portal Automated Problem Determination Tool. This tool provides automatic data collection and symptom analysis support for problem determination scenarios. Information pertinent to a problem scenario is collected and analyzed to help identify the origin of the problem being encountered.
The Automated Problem Determination Tool reduces the amount of time it takes to reproduce a problem with the proper RAS tracing levels set (trace levels are set automatically by the tool) and it also reduces the effort required to send the appropriate log information into IBM support. In addition, the tool performs symptom analysis to help streamline the problem determination process.
For more information, see: AutoPD Tool User Guide (HTML).
Logging and tracing
If you are experiencing a problem, you might want to enable tracing and then recreate the problem to capture more log information. We can enable logging and tracing for software that is shipped with WebSphere Portal. Enabling tracing makes log output more verbose. For example, we can enable tracing within WebSphere Application Server to obtain information about application servers and other processes.
For more information on this, see:
Parent topic:
Troubleshooting
Previous topic
Search IBM support Web site for a solution
Next topic
Contact support