Smarts IP: How to use the Topology Change Analysis Tool (TCAT)

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Resolution

This article explains how to use the Topology Change Analysis Tool (TCAT) tool that is supplied with Smarts 9.2.x.  This tool lists topology differences from one version of Smarts to another version of Smarts.  This tool will work with Smarts 8.1.3.x and later versions, but it is delivered with Smarts 9.2 and later software platforms.



To use the TCAT tool, both the old Smarts domain and the new Smarts domain must be running. Once both domains are running, do the following to invoke the TCAT tool and analysis scripts:

1. Navigate to <base dir>/IP/smarts/bin
2. Determine the domains that are going to have the analysis run against them:
   

3. In this instance Mustang-IP-813-AMPM-3 is the older version of software (Smarts IP 8.1.3) and Mustang-IP-AMPM-3 is the newer version of software (Smarts IP 9.2.1).
4. List the command options for the TCAT tool: sm_tcat  help
   

Note in the above help command ouput that the sm_tcat command requires two brokers and two domain servers (old and new) to be listed.

5. Enter the sm_tcat command for the domains that are going to be analyzed:
   

Note that in the above command, the broker for both domains is the same but is entered twice.

6. Make note of the out output for the TCAT tool as shown in the following example:
   

The log file in the above output lists the processing of the TCAT tool and the TCAT report file contains the analysis data for the TCAT script to process.

7. Locate the TCAT log file in case it is needed:
   

8. Locate the TCAT report file:
   

The TCAT report file will need to be copied to a Windows system that has Microsoft Excel installed on it.

9. View the TCAT analysis script file:
   

This script is an MS Excel VB Macro enabled workbook.

10.  Copy the TCAT analysis script file to the same system as the TCAT report file.
11. Open the TCAT script in Microsoft Excel:
    

12. Open the TCAT report file by first selecting the file time as Text Files:
    

13. Select the TCAT report file to open:
    

14. After opening the TCAT report file, just click the  Finish  button without changing any of the settings.
15. The report file should look similar to the following:
    

16. Press < CTRL+SHIFT+C > key combination to trigger the VBscript macros to execute against the TCAT data that was loaded from the TCAT report file.  The results will look like the following:
    

The first page of the report will be a summary of the Topology differences between the domains.

17. Make note of the five Excel worksheets (highlighted below) which organize the report data differently:
    

18. The final work book (Report) lists out the changes and gives the reason for the topology changes.

Additional Information

PDF document copy of this article is attached to the article for convenience.