A common oversight we come across a lot is customers (or partners) who have installed TKUs but have failed to realise that they will not be making full use of the functionality until they enable / configure some of the features. Could this be you?
The TKU enables additional functionality within BMC Discovery by providing TPL patterns to extend the data collected about specific software and hardware. A number of these patterns contain a configuration block.
A configuration block enables the end-user to modify certain characteristics of a pattern, such as whether to enable certain features, or to change default paths and ports. By that very description it should be understood that the pattern is shipped with a default configuration, such as ports, paths and some options disabled that therefore may need to be changed in order to get the most value within your environment.
How do we find the configuration options?
In order to understand what patterns are available within your BMC Discovery installation, you need to login and navigate to Manage -> Knowledge. At the top of the page under Knowledge Summary it will list which TKU’s you have installed. The options are TKU, EDP and Storage.
Above the Knowledge Summary there are 4 hyperlinks and one of these is View All Pattern Configuration. Clicking this link will provide a list of all the TPL patterns installed on your instance of BMC Discovery that have configuration options available to set.
Why is this important?
Lets take a couple of examples to answer that question.
A number of the configuration options contain the ability to set a default installation path for software configuration files. When called, the TPL pattern will run through scripted routines to try and dynamically find configuration files and may be reliant upon using the default install path variable as the only method available to query the configuration files. If, as an organisation, you don’t install software into default locations then this method will also fail until you update the configuration option with your organisations default install locations.
Other configuration options are the ability to determine whether the pattern should run specific routines. The BMC Patrol pattern has a routine to run pconfig.exe command in order to obtain the Performance Manager RTServer name. Once it has this it can then create a relationship link between the SoftwareInstances. However, by default this option is switched off.
What could be symptoms of incorrectly configured TKU?
Typically one of the most common symptoms of either incorrectly configured TKU options or incorrectly permissioned discovery credentials would be missing information such as Software Version, Installed Options, database schemas / tables or relationships between components.
I need help identifying and fixing our misconfigurations.
Our team is here for just that – from undertaking a free health check of your system and providing you with a plan to success through to delivering that plan on your behalf.
Contact us today to discuss how we can work with you to make your project a success.
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