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#System Administration

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System administration refers to the management of one or more hardware and software systems.

Documentation on InterSystems system administration.

Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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Some Usage cases

1. A deployment may consist of two high availability instances and two disaster recovery instances in a different data center.

The corresponding UAT environment could replicate this giving a total of 8 instances. How do you confirm CPF and Scheduled task alignment across ALL instances.

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Suppose you have developed your own app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform multiple deployments on the customers' side. During the development process you've composed a detailed installation guide for your application, because you need to not only import classes, but also fine-tune the environment according to your needs.
To address this specific task, InterSystems has created a special tool called %Installer. Read on to find out how to use it.

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Overview

Predictable storage IO performance with low latency is vital to provide scalability and reliability for your applications. This set of benchmarks is to inform users of IRIS considering deploying applications in AWS about EBS gp3 volume performance.

Summary

  • An LVM stripe can increase IOPS and throughput beyond single EBS volume performance limits.
  • An LVM stripe lowers read latency.
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** Revised Feb-12, 2018

While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.

Introduction

Memory is managed in pages. The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.

At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources. As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default. This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages. Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages. However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.

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YASPE is the successor to YAPE (Yet Another pButtons Extractor). YASPE has been written from the ground up with many internal changes to allow easier maintenance and enhancements.

YASPE functions:

  • Parse and chart InterSystems Caché pButtons and InterSystems IRIS SystemPerformance files for quick performance analysis of Operating System and IRIS metrics.
  • Allow a deeper dive by creating ad-hoc charts and by creating charts combining the Operating System and IRIS metrics with the "Pretty Performance" option.
  • The "System Overview" option saves you from searching your SystemPerformance files for system details or common configuration options.

YASPE is written in Python and is available on GitHub as source code or for Docker containers at:

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In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. I did a similar post in the past for Caché, so feel free to check that out here if you are not running InterSystems IRIS. Much like the original, the goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running. Example screenshots are taken on a 2018.1.1 version of IRIS, so yours may look slightly different.

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Article
David Underhill · Jul 12, 2019 2m read
Basic Database Metrics example

This is a self contained class that can be run from the Intersystems Task Scheduler which records peak usage details for databases and licenses built up throughout the day and retaining 30 days history.

To schedule the task to run every hour:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule()

You can also specify your own start time, stop time, and run interval:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule(startTime, stopTime, intervalMins)

Metrics are stored in ^Metrics in the namespace that the class resides in/is run from.

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Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

I this article we'll discuss:

  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • Connecting your environments to GitLab
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From time to time, we get the previous question in support, something or someone is using more licenses than expected, and we need to find what.

We have two scenarios. The first scenario is when we realize that the licenses are exhausted when the application does not work or when we try to connect through the terminal and get the "lovely"

<LICENSE LIMIT EXCEEDED> message:

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InterSystems Reports is powered by Logi Report (formerly named JReport), a product of Logi Analytics. InterSystems Reports is supported by InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health. It provides a robust modern reporting solution that includes:

  • Embedded operational reporting which can be customized by both report developers and end users.
  • Pixel-perfect formatting that lets you develop highly specific form grids or other special layout elements for invoices, documents, and forms.
  • Banded layouts that provide structure for aggregated and detailed data.
  • Exact positioning of headers, footers, aggregations, detailed data, images, and sub-reports.
  • A variety of page report types.
  • Large-scale dynamic report scheduling and distribution including export to PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, and other file formats, printing, and archiving for regulatory compliance.

InterSystems Reports consists of:

  • A report designer, which provides Design and Preview Tabs that enable report developers to create and preview reports with live data.
  • A report server which provides end users browser-based access to run, schedule, filter, and modify reports.

From InterSystems documentation.

This article focuses on the Server part of InterSystems Reports and provides a guide on running Report Server in containers while persisting all the data.

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In this post I show strategies for backing up Caché using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot based solutions. The majority of solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

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Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

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Pouring The Coffee: Creating and scheduling a task

Don't you wish a fresh, hot cup of coffee could be waiting for you right when you get into the office? Let's automate that!

Cache and IRIS come with a built-in Task Manager, which should have a familiar feel to those used to using the Windows task scheduler or using cron on Linux. Your user account will need access to the %Admin_Task resource to use it, and you can access it in the management portal under System Operation -> Task Manager. When first installed, there are roughly 20 types of task that you can schedule.

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This post provides useful links and an overview of best practice configuration for low latency storage IO by creating LVM Physical Extent (PE) stripes for database disks on InterSystems Data Platforms; InterSystems IRIS, Caché, and Ensemble.

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I wanted to write it as a comment to article of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.

Image result for docker clean all images

I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it. I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.

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Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

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This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

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