Smarts NCM or Voyence Control: Purging or pruning jobs with the archive-utility.pl tool fails to shrink job related tables

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


Smarts Network Configuration Manager (NCM) PostgreSQL Control Database (controldb) growth cannot be effectively managed.

Attempts to control the growth of the controldb by performing maintenance with the database-utility.pl or archive-utility.pl tools are ineffective or less effective than needed at reducing the size of jobs related tables, causing the controldb to take up excessive space on the host file system.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - NCM

Cause

The archive utility can only work on jobs that are not currently running. All child jobs attached to a running recurring parent job are also considered active even after they have completed because a parent job and all associated child jobs are treated as a distinct set. This prevents completed child jobs from being pruned, archived, or purged because those operations can only be performed on the set as a whole. If a parent recurring job has been running for an extended period of time, a large number of child jobs may be inaccessible to the database-utility.pl or archive-utility.pl tools.

Resolution

Recurring jobs must be cancelled so they can enter an inactive state that allows the child jobs associated with them to be successfully archived as part of a set. If the recurring job is currently needed to perform a function in the Smarts NCM-managed environment, the function can be satisfied by copying the recurring job to a new job, then scheduling the new job as needed. Depending on how many child jobs are generated on each iteration of a long-running recurring job, as well as how frequently the recurring job runs, it may be advisable to perform this maintenance on a regular schedule (ex.: monthly, quarterly, annually).

To make the set of child jobs associated with long-running recurring parent job available to the database-utility.pl or archive-utility.pl tools, do the following:

1. Log into the NCM Client Application as a user with 'sysadmin' privileges.
2. Click Tools on the top main menu, then Schedule Manager from the Tools drop-down menu:

    

3. In the Schedule Manager dialog, select the Recurring Series tab to display a list of active recurring jobs.
4. For each recurring job listed in the Schedule Manager dialog, repeat the following steps to create a new copy of the job:
   1. Select the recurring job.
   2. Click the Copy symbol at the top of the Schedule Manager dialog (as shown below) to create a copy of the job. This will cause the Schedule dialog to appear.

3. In the pop-up Schedule dialogue pane, use the options displayed to schedule the new recurring job.
4. Click the Approve and Submit button at the bottom of the 'Schedule' job pane to cause the new recurring job to start.

5. In the Schedule Manager dialog, repeat the following steps to delete all old recurring jobs listed:
   1. Select the old recurring job by clicking on it.
   2. Click the Reject Job symbol at the top of the Schedule Manager dialog to cancel the job.    

3. Click the Delete symbol at the top of the Schedule Manager dialog to delete the job.

6. Log out of and close the Smarts NCM Client Application.

Child jobs formerly associated with long-running recurring parent jobs will now be available for database maintenance operations using the database-utility.pl or archive-utility.pl tools

See Notes in the following for more information.

Additional Information

Using the NCM archive-utility.pl tool

For detailed instructions on using the Smarts NCM database-utility.pl or archive-utility.pl tools as well as the PostgreSQL vacuum command, see the "Archiving Data" and the "Running a full database vacuum" sections in the appendices of the Smarts NCM Installation Guide. Instructions on how to run these tools and commands vary according to the operating system running on the controldb host (Application, Combination, or Distributed Database server).

Determining the size of NCM database tables

For information on how to determine the size of database tables in Smarts NCM, see EMC knowledgebase article 16033 .

This articles has been promoted as HVC on EMC Community Network (ECN): https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-55373