TIBCO Tutorial

Welcome to TIBCO Tutorials. The objective of these tutorials is to provide in depth understand of TIBCO.

In addition to free TIBCO Tutorials, we will cover common interview questions, issues and how to’s of TIBCO.

Introduction

TIBCO provides a common framework for integrating incompatible and distributed systems – making it faster and easier to tie together applications and Web Services so you can integrate them into business processes that span your organization. TIBCO reduces the complexity of your IT infrastructure and dramatically improves its reliability, flexibility and scalability – giving you the ability to focus on improving how your business runs instead of worrying about whether or not your infrastructure will be scalable or flexible enough to support new initiatives or capitalize on perpetual shifts in the market.

TIBCO Hawk

TIBCO Hawk is a monitoring tool which is used to manage distributed applications running across multiple servers or multiple geographic. you can use TIBCO hawk for reading log files and can have rules based upon certain keyword e.g. ERROR or Exception and when such word comes in log file it will alert the TIBCO hawk GUI also called TIBCO HAWK Display. hawk can also monitor whether a process is up or down etc. TIBCO Hawk is based upon TIBCO RV and uses TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV capability for all its messaging requirements.

TIBCO hawk consists following functional components:

Hawk Agent:

This is the most important part of whole TIBCO Hawk suite and has to be deployed in all host you would like to monitor. So a Hawk agent is a TIBCO Hawk process which performs all the monitoring and management tasks on the host as defined in the rulebase. For example TIBCO Hawk Agent can look for certain words e.g. ERROR or Exception and when such word comes in log file it will alert the TIBCO hawk GUI.

Hawk Micro Agents:

Hawk Micro Agents are objects that acts as data source , it supports various methods invoked by the hawk agents and console applications.

Hawk Rulebase and Rules:

In General a TIBCO Hawk Rule is a user defined rule for monitoring application which involves one or more data sources (micro agents) and check for specific conditions and takes one or more actions based upon those conditions. a hawk rulebase is simply collection of one or more hawk rules.

Hawk Monitor (Dispaly):

TIBCO hawk monitor is a console application which shows a graphical view of all managed hosts and objects and enables interacting with them. Its like a GUI screen where you can see the status of different managed host, it uses color coding to highlight status e.g. if a process is up and there is no error then it shows that in green color while if a process is down or there are any errors it shows color. Other than green e.g. RED. The console API allows development of customized hawk display application based upon needs o monitoring team.

Hawk AMI:

TIBCO Hawk AMI is an API provided for instrumenting a Hawk managed application. TIBCO hawk AMI available in C, C++ and Java implements a TIBCO RV based protocol with two way dynamic discovery for the TIBCO hawk monitoring. you can also used with no TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV application as well.

Hawk Event Service:

TIBCO Hawk Event Service is a console API based application that records the activity reported by the hawk agents in logs. You can also configured hawk event service to take rule based action in response to different hawk events.

Benefits of using TIBCO hawk for monitoring applications:

Scalable Deployment: TIBCO hawk uses distributed event-driven monitoring architecture which enables conservation of network bandwidth and system resources sharing the monitoring load with different hosts. TIBCO hawk alerts are generated only when a error or exception occurs, so in normal case minimal network bandwidth would be utilized.

Location Transparency:

TIBCO Hawk Agent and TIBCO hawk display communicate using TIBCO Rendezvous or TIBCO RV messages. Since TIBCO RV uses subject based addressing, so physical location of each component is not important what matters is all component subscribe on relevant subjects.Also multiple instances of TIBCO hawk display can run from any location on the network without changing any configuration incurring additional network overhead.

Flexible Rule based monitoring:

Rule based monitoring allows TIBCO hawk to configure advanced and sophisticated rules based on different behaviors of different applications.TIBCO hawk not only generates alerts and actions but also provides advanced features to implement solutions such as automatic restarting of application processes, creating escalating actions in response to a deteriorating problem taking an action when an alert clears and automatically alerting monitoring behavior based on user defined schedules.

Ease of Configuration and Management:

Administrators can configure all the nodes in a TIBCO hawk domain through a central repository by creating and deploying monitoring rules within the repository. Also administrators can create customized views of the TIBCO hawk console display for monitoring specific events/nodes.

Several Hawk displays can be brought up anywhere on the network without impacting each other.

Installation Modes

Three installation modes are available:

GUI

console

silent

GUI Mode

In the GUI mode, the installer presents panels that allow you to make choices about product selection, product location, and so on. To invoke the installer in GUI mode, double-click the executable.

Console Mode

Console mode allows you to run the installer from the command prompt or terminal window. This is useful if your machine does not have a GUI environment.

Silent Mode

Silent mode installs the product using either default or custom settings that are saved in a response file. Silent mode installs the product without prompting you for information.

Installation Types

Two installation types are available: Profile or Custom.

-The Profile installation type installs all the software for a specific profile.

-The Custom installation type allows you to select components.

Installer Account

Microsoft Windows

You must have administrator privileges for the machine on which this product is installed. If you do not have administrator privileges, the installer exits. You must then log out of the system and log in as a user with the required privileges, or request your system administrator to assign the privileges to your account.

If you intend to install the product on a network drive, ensure that the account used for installation has permission to access the network drive.

UNIX

Any user can install this product.

Regular (non-root) user

Super-user (root).

While installing this product on UNIX platforms, ensure that the same installer account is used to install all TIBCO <Family> products.

A graphic environment such as CDE or X Windows is required to run the installer in GUI mode.

The following sections describe the installation process in the available installation modes:

GUI Mode

Console Mode

Silent Mode

GUI Mode To install this product in GUI mode:

Open the physical media or download the package.

Extract the contents of the package to a temporary directory.

Navigate to the temporary directory.

Run TIBCOUniversalInstaller. You can do so in one of the following ways:

 -Double-click the installer icon.

 -On the command prompt, provide the absolute path of the installer file onwithout specifying any options. The installer defaults to GUI mode.

Click the Next button on the Welcome dialog.

Read through the license text when the License Agreement dialog appears, select the I Accept the Terms of the License Agreement radio button and then click the Next button.

Select an installation profile from the list on the left. TIBCO Universal Installer provides the following installation profiles:

Gateway Only

This profile is intended for installation on the Gateway machine, which is located in the DMZ zone outside the company’s firewall. With this profile, the following pre-selected components will be installed: — Gateway Documentation — BusinessConnect Runtime: Gateway

Interior Server Only

This profile is intended for the BusinessConnect administrator. With this profile, the following pre-selected components will be installed: — Interior Server Documentation — BusinessConnect Runtime: Interior Server — BusinessConnect Tools: Interior Server Tools

Typical

This profile is intended for the BusinessConnect administrator, same as the option Interior Server Only. However, in some cases a user would want to have all components on the same machine, such as for testing. If you choose this installation profile, all components will be installed: — Interior Server Documentation, Gateway Documentation — BusinessConnect Runtime: Interior Server, Gateway — Interior Server Tools

Click the Next button. The TIBCO Installation Home dialog displays.

An installation environment isolates product installations. A product installed into an installation environment does not access components in other installation environments. An installation environment consists of a name and path. You can choose a new environment or an existing environment.

— Create a new TIBCO_HOME To install the product into a new installation environment, specify the following properties: Directory The directory into which the product is installed. Type a path or click Browse to specify the path or accept the default location. The path cannot contain special characters such as "*", "#", "?", ">", "<", "%", "&", "$", "`", or "|". The path cannot be the same as the path of an existing environment. Name Identifies the installation environment. The name cannot contain special characters such as "*", "?", ">", "<", ":", "|", "/", "\", or quotation marks("). The name is appended to the name of Windows services created by the installer and is a component of the path to the product in the Windows Start > All Programs menu. — Use an existing TIBCO_HOME To install the product into an existing installation environment, select the environment from the drop-down list.

Click the Next button.

Verify the list of products selected for install in the Pre-Install Summary dialog.

Click the Install button to start the installation process.

Review the information listed in the Post-Install Summary dialog.

Click the Finish button to complete the installation process and exit the universal installer.

Console Mode

To install this product in console mode:

Open the physical media or download the package.

Extract the contents of the package to a temporary directory.

Using a console window, navigate to the temporary directory.

Run the following commands:

Windows: TIBCOUniversalInstaller.exe -console

AIX: TIBCOUniversalInstaller-aix.bin -console

HP UX: TIBCOUniversalInstaller-hpux-ia64.bin -console

Linux: TIBCOUniversalInstaller-lnx-x86.bin -console

Solaris Sparc: TIBCOUniversalInstaller-sol-sparc.bin -console

Solaris X86 64: TIBCOUniversalInstaller-sol-x86.bin -console

Complete the installation by responding to the console window prompts

Silent Mode

In silent mode, the universal installer does not prompt for any inputs during installation. Instead, the inputs are read from a response file that can be provided as a command-line parameter. If no value is specified, the installer uses the default TIBCOUniversalInstaller-bc.silent file.

The TIBCOUniversalInstaller.silent file is packaged in the directory that contains the universal installer. Edit the file with information for your environment before launching the silent installation. The file includes comments that describe the installation properties you can set. While you can use the TIBCOUniversalInstaller-bc.silent file, it’s good practice to copy the file to a different name and use that file for the silent install.

If errors occur during installation, they will be listed in the installation log file located in the User_Home/.TIBCO directory.

Open the physical media or download the package.

Extract the contents of the package to a temporary directory.

Using a console window, navigate to the temporary directory.

Make a copy of the TIBCO Universal Installer-bc. silent file and rename the file.

Using a text editor, open the copied file and update the install location and features to install.

Run the following:

Windows TIBCOUniversalInstaller.cmd -silent -V responseFile="myfilename.silent" UNIX TIBCOUniversalInstaller.bin -silent -V responseFile="myfilename.silent