I am just starting to play with the Server Automation and having a problem right from the get/go.
I am created a new plan with one step, to dynamically run baselines from a site. I then jump into the setup of the action, and select my PC as the target after checking the box for applicabilty, select the site with the baselines I want to run, set the start time a few minutes ahead, and click Ok.
The action is created, but my PC does not appear under the computers tab, just a message “No computers meet the filter criteria”. My PC is one of he many “Applicable Computers” for all of the baselines in the site. Same issue no matter what PC I try.I created another Plan using a simple Restart Endpoint, same issue.
I must be missing something…
TIA
Hi there,
So when you say the action is created - are you talking about (A) the plan action? Or (B) the action created for that one step in the plan?
Both of these should appear in the Automation Plan Status dashboard - the plan action (A) will appear in the top pane, and the step action (B) will appear in the bottom pane
(also, when you look at (A) under All Content > Actions you will see an XML document in it’s action script section. And when you look at (B) in All Content > Actions you’ll see it’s name like “#{IEMPlan …”
Cheers,
Paul.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the quick response. The action I am referring appears under all actions, if that makes sense. It is the scheduled run of the plan. The action once saved has the three tabs Summary, Computers and Target. The Computers tabs is empty and the Target tab reads “planEngineGeneric”.
The xml, does list the intended target, by name, however the relevance statement above is one word “false”
Cheers,
–Doug
Hi Paul,
Just read ALL the words in your response. In the Automation Plan Status dashboard, the steps do not appear.
I am looking into that now…
Thx
XML paste is badly reformatted. deleted. here a snip
Hey, thanks Doug.
So the action you’re describing there is the plan action.
It is expected that this has no targets defined on the action itself, because it does not actually perform any work on any endpoint.
Instead, the automation plan engine detects this action and uses the XML it contains to automatically generate the actions necessary to perform the sequence of work defined in the plan.
So it looks like the plan action is being generated, but it’s not being processed by the plan engine. There can be various reasons for this. First thing to check would be that in the SA domain in the console, go to Automation > Warnings and see if there’s anything relevant in there. Also take a look at the plan engine log file: <BES Server Dir>\Applications\Logs\pe_console.log
Cheers,
Paul.
The thanks is all in your direction Paul.
I had noticed that there was a warning about the BES client and the BES Server plug-in service running under different credentials. I put in a change request but was told, that the issue discussed with IBM and they said it was not a problem. I let that go, but may have to revisit it.
I’ll look into the logs to see if there’s something of explanation there.
Ah yes, I do remember that one - it used to be that it had to be the same system user both encrypting and decrypting passwords used by the server plugin. In the case of different service accounts, the BES client user would be encrypting and the BES Server Plugin user that would be decrypting, so the end result would not be correct.
I might be wrong, but I think that may have been fixed.
But if there’s no relevant fixlets in the Warnings dir, they yes, have a look at the plan engine log.
Alright then, I’ll ignore that warning for the moment.
Here’s a bit of the pe_console log. I don’t know if the java.io exception is relevant, but the “Found (0) plan actions to process” is.
2016-06-23 11:29:12,937 INFO [PlanEngine] (core.PlanEngine:371) :: IZNENG173I Found (0) plan actions to process. 2016-06-23 11:29:17,093 ERROR [PlanEngine] (core.PlanEngine:321) :: IZNENG198E An error occurred while removing obsolete dashboard variables from the system: "IZNENG145E Running the REST post operation "https://oc-bigfix01.*****.local:52311/api/query" caused the error Parsing the REST reponse to the request "https://oc-bigfix01.*****.local:52311/api/query" caused an error..". com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.exception.IemInteractionException: IZNENG145E Running the REST post operation "https://oc-bigfix01.*****.local:52311/api/query" caused the error Parsing the REST reponse to the request "https://oc-bigfix01.*****.local:52311/api/query" caused an error.. at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiInterface.executeRequest(RestApiInterface.java:938) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiInterface.evaluateRelevance(RestApiInterface.java:116) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.core.util.PlanRuntimeDataApi.cleanupObsoleteVariables(PlanRuntimeDataApi.java:1189) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.core.PlanEngine.checkRuntimeDataCleanup(PlanEngine.java:318) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.core.PlanEngine.run(PlanEngine.java:204) Caused by: java.io.IOException: Parsing the REST reponse to the request "https://oc-bigfix01.*****.local:52311/api/query" caused an error. at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiResponseHandler.handleResponse(RestApiResponseHandler.java:204) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiResponseHandler.handleResponse(RestApiResponseHandler.java:53) at org.apache.http.impl.client.CloseableHttpClient.execute(CloseableHttpClient.java:218) at org.apache.http.impl.client.CloseableHttpClient.execute(CloseableHttpClient.java:160) at org.apache.http.impl.client.CloseableHttpClient.execute(CloseableHttpClient.java:136) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiInterface.executeRequest(RestApiInterface.java:857) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiInterface.executeRequest(RestApiInterface.java:936) ... 4 more Caused by: com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.exception.IemInteractionException: IZNENG146E Evaluating the relevance expression " elements of ( set of ( parenthesized parts 1 of ( matches ( regex "^PlanActionRuntimeData_([0-9]+)$" ) of it ) of ( names of shared variables whose ( name of it starts with "PlanActionRuntimeData_" ) of bes wizard whose ( dashboard id of it = "pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo" ) ) ) - set of ( ( ids of it as string ) of bes actions whose ( action script of it starts with "#!/plan/xml" ) ) )" caused the following error: "Singular expression refers to nonexistent object.". at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiResponseHandler.checkForRelevanceError(RestApiResponseHandler.java:232) at com.ibm.tivoli.iemfsa.planengine.iem.api.rest.RestApiResponseHandler.handleResponse(RestApiResponseHandler.java:191) ... 10 more 2016-06-23 11:29:17,280 INFO [PlanEngine] (core.PlanEngine:371) :: IZNENG173I Found (0) plan actions to process.
Hmm… quite strange.
Looks like something’s not gone right with the gather or unpacking of the SA site if I was a betting man.
Try this:
- Open your BES console and Press
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D
- In the dialog that pops up, check the show debug menu option
- You’ll now have a ‘Debug’ menu available in your BES Console
- Select that, and go to the Presentation Debugger
- Now enter this relevance expression, hit the Evaluate button and see what it tells you:
dashboard ids whose( it starts with "pe_" ) of bes wizards
There should be one there called pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo
Cheers,
Paul.
As expected:
pe_PlanActionList-v8.2.ojo
pe_PlanActionList-vcurrent.ojo
pe_PlanList-v8.2.ojo
pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo
pe_PlanTestPerformance-v8.2.ojo
pe_PlanTestPerformance.ojo
If the v8.2 is referring to a version number, it does not match our BigFix version of 9.2
Okay, how about this:
names of shared variables whose ( name of it starts with "PlanActionRuntimeData_" ) of bes wizard whose ( dashboard id of it = "pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo" )
or
names of shared variables of bes wizard whose ( dashboard id of it = “pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo” )
The first query returns nothing, the second gave me this:
PlanActionRuntimeDataCleanup
PlanEnginePublicKey
PlanEnginePublicKeyDER
PlanEnginePublicKeyHash
Okay, so I suppose you may as well run the full one that was causing the problem:
elements of ( set of ( parenthesized parts 1 of (
matches ( regex "^PlanActionRuntimeData_([0-9]+)$"
) of it ) of ( names of shared variables whose ( name of it starts with "PlanActionRuntimeData_" ) of bes wizard whose ( dashboard id of it = "pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo"
) ) ) - set of ( ( ids of it as string )
of bes actions whose ( action script of it starts with
"#!/plan/xml" ) ) )
Sorry, I don’t have the patience to format that 
Just back from lunch…
I got nothing back on that one. Is there some formatting I need to do?
Opening the wizard for the Automation Plan Configuration, I see a yellow banner notifying me
"There is no public key found on the BES Server. Generate a public key for the BES Server" with a “Take Action” button.
The button takes me to create the Take Action window, to run the “Enable Encryption for Clients” flxlet ID 978.
I ran it to both of our Bigfix servers, but the message in the wizard remains.
More info:
After some time, the message about the missing public key in the wizard for Automation Plan Configuration went away.
However, when I enter the TEM Platform API Username and Password, and click the Create Action button, I get a popup box titled “a message from webpage” that reads “null” with a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it.
The pe-console logs look to be growing at a much faster rate than they have in the past, with a new 51MB log twice a day now, as compared to one a month before last week.
Thanks much,
Hi Doug,
On the last point - so if you’re on 9.2, then you don’t set the credentials using the wizard, you use fixlet #1294 () on the BES Support site for that.
Interesting that you can run the same relevance expression in the presentation debugger without issue (the formatting I mentioned was just to make it a bit more readable, it would have no impact on the actual evaluation of it) but when the SA plan engine evaluates it, it’s getting a relevance exception back from the platform REST API.
So the platform REST API uses web reports to evaluate it’s relevance, so maybe let’s try evaluating that same expression in web reports:
- in the BES console, go to the
Tools menu and select the Launch Web Reports option
- In the browser window that pops up, replace the last part of the URL with:
/webreports?page=EvaluateRelevance
- You should now be presented with a text area - put the same relevance expression (the last one I posted) in there and hit the “Evaluate” button at the bottom of the page.
What does that give you?
Q: elements of ( set of ( parenthesized parts 1 of (
E: This expression could not be parsed.
matches ( regex “^PlanActionRuntimeData_([0-9]+)$”
) of it ) of ( names of shared variables whose ( name of it starts with “PlanActionRuntimeData_” ) of bes wizard whose ( dashboard id of it = “pe_PlanList-vcurrent.ojo”
) ) ) - set of ( ( ids of it as string )
of bes actions whose ( action script of it starts with
"#!/plan/xml" ) ) )
I ran Fixlets #1294 & #1295 a week or so ago, in the setup for SWD.
SWD is also a problem, which I mention not for your help, but because there may be a problem with the credentials?
