#System Administration

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

There are often questions surrounding the ideal Apache HTTPD Web Server configuration for HealthShare. The contents of this article will outline the initial recommended web server configuration for any HealthShare product.

As a starting point, Apache HTTPD version 2.4.x (64-bit) is recommended. Earlier versions such as 2.2.x are available, however version 2.2 is not recommended for performance and scalability of HealthShare.

This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

From the first glance, the task of configuring LDAP authentication in Caché is not hard at all – the manual describes this process in just 6 paragraphs. On the other hand, if the LDAP server uses Microsoft Active Directory, there a few non-evident things that need to be configured on the LDAP server side. Those who don’t do anything like that on a regular basis may get lost in Caché settings. In this article, we will describe the step-by-step process of setting up LDAP authentication and cover the diagnostic methods that can be used if something doesn’t work as expected.

This is the third article (see Part 1 and Part 2) where I continue to introduce you to the internal structure of Caché databases. This time, I will tell you a few interesting things and explain how my Caché Blocks Explorer project can help make your work more productive.

I was approached recently by and end use who wanted to perform analysis of their databases and see how they could save some space by picking data good for deletion without harming the application. As part of investigation, they wanted to know sizes of globals within datasets. This can be achieved by various means but all of them provide data in text form only.

I thought I might be a good tool for database administrators in general - to see global sizes in a graphical way.

In old Caché versions it was possible to create a new role based on predefined %Developer by copying it and adding some resources as needed. It was true at least from 2010.1 to 2015.1.

After upgrade from 2015.1.4 to 2017.2.1 it turned that it's only partially true now. User with a "New-Developer" role can enter Studio and open existing cls/mac/etc for editing and everything is OK unless he tries to create something new (Ctrl-N), than he gets a pop-up with %msg: <User xxx does not have enough privilege to execute stored procedure %CSP.StudioTemplateMgr_Templates>

If you have ever issued the command ccontrol help to discover what ccontrol is capable of, perhaps you noticed this section:

Syntax:
ccontrol default
Description:
Display the name of the default Cache instance,
if one has been designated.

This is a sample Ensemble/Health Connect production which demonstrates how to receive an HL7 order (ORM) inbound from a file, extract fields (in this case, basic demographic information), and insert those into a table in an external SQL database via ODBC.

Included in the zip file:

• Exported code
• Sample ORM message
• 'How to configure' doc

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

I wanted to see some alerts that occur in my Productions in a Mobile Device, I came across Pushover.net recently that although has an upfront cost $5 you can send as many messages as you like after that, there is a 7 day free trial to check it out.

To Integrate this with a production I did the following.

Create an account and set up a device on https://pushover.net/

Record the following API Keys from the web site on the main page you will see

Container Images

In this second post on containers fundamentals, we take a look at what container images are.

What is a container image?

A container image is merely a binary representation of a container.

A running container or simply a container is the runtime state of the related container image.

Please see the first post that explains what a container is.