Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 10: Best practice - GUI vs Batch

BPPM has provided many different graphical user interfaces to help you configure different BPPM components.  For example, you can use PATROL Central Console or PATROL Classical Console to configure a PATROL KM.  The GUI provides a way to validate many things you typed including directory names, Oracle instance names, etc.

GUI is great to configure your first server, your second server, perhaps not even bad on your fifth server.  How about if you have 200 Oracle servers to configure? Don't you wish you have a less tedious and faster way to accomplish your work?

Yes when it comes to mass deployment, batch would be a whole lot faster and easier to accomplish your work and keep you from going nuts with repetitive work. Here is how you can move from GUI to batch for your PATROL KM configuration.

For PATROL KM configuration, on the first server, you run 'pconfig +get > C:\temp\pconfig1.txt' command to retrieve all pconfig values into a text file. Then you simply configure the KM on your first server using GUI.  After that run 'pconfig +get > C:\temp\pconfig2.txt' command to retrieve all pconfig values into another text file.  Do a diff on these two text files, you will have all pconfig variables that belong to this KM.  Look at each pconfig variable to find out what needs to be changed for a different server.  If you are not sure, repeat the same process on your second server to confirm what values need to be changed.  Simply make the changes either manually or using a script.  You will end up having different pconfig sets to be deployed to different servers using either 'pconfig' command or PATROL Configuration Manager (PCM).

Where else can you use batch deployment?  You may need to use batch deployment with BPPM cell since you may have total 10-100 cells in your dev, QA, and production environment combined.  Many of your BPPM cells have the same policies and data tables that are configured through GUI.  In this case, you can simply export the policies and data tables from an existing cell, make any necessary modifications, and import them into the new cell.  Using batch deployment on BPPM cell configuration will not only cut down your deployment time, it will also eliminate discrepancies due to human errors.

In general, any GUI configuration in your environment is worth finding a way for batch deployment if the work needs to be repeated more than 3 times.