Collecting troubleshooting data with diagnostic plans
You can use diagnostic plans to help diagnose intermittent or long-lasting problems in WebSphere® Application Server. With a properly configured diagnostic plan, an application server can respond automatically to an anticipated problem and produce the wanted traces and Java dumps.
About this task
Administrators of the product must capture diagnostic data when a problem occurs. Diagnostic data can be logs, trace files, Java dumps, or other data, depending on the problem. IBM support often requires you to collect diagnostic data to assist in problem resolution. If the problem you are diagnosing occurs infrequently and unpredictably, it can be difficult to collect diagnostic data at the correct time. If data is not collected soon after the problem occurs, the log or trace files can roll over, resulting in loss of the needed diagnostic data.
Rather than wait for the problem to occur and capture the debugging data manually, diagnostic plans enable you to configure the application server to automatically respond to an anticipated problem and capture the needed diagnostic data.
Diagnostic plans are useful for diagnosing the intermittent issue or issues that take a long time to reproduce because they don't require manual monitoring of the server status. Diagnostic plans also can reduce the possibility of missing the time window to collect diagnostic data when the anticipated problem eventually occurs.
To use diagnostic plans, identify one or more log entries, trace entries, or FFDC incidents that are emitted when the problem you are diagnosing occurs. Then, set the diagnostic plan in the problematic application server to automatically monitor for those entries or incidents and automatically collect the needed diagnostic data when the problem occurs. Use AdminControl wsadmin scripts to configure diagnostic plans and view plan status. To set or clear a diagnostic plan, use the DiagPlanManager MBean. Refer to the MBean interface documentation for details on the MBean and supported functions.
Procedure
Results
The diagnostic plan is configured on the application server. To view the execution history of the current or past configured diagnostic plan, check the $SERVER_LOG_ROOT/diagPlanSummary.log file.