How does Performance Center determine the IP address of its host

Products

• CA Infrastructure Management
• CA Performance Management - Usage and Administration

Issue/Introduction

When the host server for CA Performance Center runs a dual NIC it has been observed that after a restart of the server the IP address CA Performance Center uses changed.

How does CA Performance Center select the IP address of its host in dual NIC configurations?

Environment

All supported CA Performance Center releases

Resolution

1. PC uses the Java SDK to ask the java VM for the system's interfaces. Once the answer is received it then cycles the IP addresses on the device returned.
2. It will use the first IPv4 address found that is also not configured as a loopback interface.
3. It will take that address and update the appropriate fields in the netqosportal DB (in the data_sources2 and performance_center_properties tables).

• Configuring Jetty different than it is now, to support a config that sets the IP/interface to use in a static fashion, is technically possible. For CAPM CAPC server Jetty implementation it is something never tested. As such it would be an Enhancement Request.
• We can use the SsoConfig script to update CAPM with a specific IP. This will over ride any change that may be made during a restart using the wrong IP.

Additional Information

To override what gets set use the SsoConfig tool. When running SsoConfig, enter 1 for PC, then 3 for PC settings. Within are two values involved, the Web Service Host and Web Site Host values. By default these are set in the netqosportal MySql DB in CAPC. They are found in the performance_center_properties table as field names NpcWebServiceHost and NpcWebSiteHost. They can have three possible Priority values. They are: 

• 0 (zero): Default value set by system 
• 1: Remote Value 
• 2: Local Override 

1 and 2 map back to the options for where user updates can be made via the SsoConfig CLI tool. 

During the sync process during the PC restart, where it’s doing this IP check, it will always write to those 2 attributes at Priority Level 0, the IP that JDK gives back. 

The values we sync to the other data sources themselves will come from the Remote Value (Priority 1) that the user can override with a specific IP. This would be the IP you would want things communicating to the PC server on all the time. 

Changing the remote values should not require a restart of the services. They should take effect the next sync cycle for the various data sources. You can check Priority 0 is still possibly getting updated, but data_sources2 table in netqosportal has an entry for PC and it should be the remote value, and every sync after that, it should still be the remote value. 

Check the URL http://DA:8581/rest/dataaggregator to see what NpcHostName is synced down to the DA. 

If for some reason PC didn’t reread the values from performance_center_properties restart the PC services.