| Siebel Administration > Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA)
Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA)
RDA is a set of perl scripts that provides a command line diagnostic tool.
RDA does not interfere with any configuration and does not have to integrated
with any application. It needs to be unzipped into a separate folder and needs
space (for siebel it needed about 500MB when I used it).
It is safe to run in a production environment.When we run these perl
scripts, it will ask where Siebel is located and enterprise name and some more
parameters. It can be very useful to diagnose Siebel crashes when we do not
have FDR and callstack files generated and this is what I will explain here.
I had downloaded RDA from here - https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=314422.1
Oracle changes links sometimes, so search for this in support.oracle.com, if the scripts
are not there.
RDA has scripts for different environments. You could use rda.sh, rda.cmd, rda.com, or rda.pl,
depending on what platform you are using it.
Once you download the installation, verify the installation by typing <rda> -cv
e.g. rda.sh -cv or rda.pl -cv and so on.
The RDA application can only capture details from the machine where RDA is installed.
It cannot remotely capture information from other machines within your Siebel enterprise.
We need to install it (unzip and verify) in each server where we want to analyze crashes.
We can use RDA to analyze crashes both in the web server and siebel server.
I was not able to find anything useful analyzing web server crashes, if you do,
I would appreciate a note.
We have unzipped RDA in folder /siebsrvr/RDA.
Before we run RDA, we will need these values
1. Enterprise name of Siebel
2. Name of Siebel server
3. ID of crashing process
4. name and path of coredump.
Go to siebsrvr/RAD and run the command ./rda.sh -vT siebel
The output shown below is an example of how the results look like.
siebel@siebelserver:/siebel/8.1/siebsrvr/RDA> ./rda.sh -vT siebel
Testing ...
Collecting Siebel crash data ...
Enter the full path of the directory where Siebel Server is installed
> /siebel/8.1/
Enter the name for the enterprise in the Application
> SIEBEL_ENT
Enter the name for the server for the enterprise
> SIEBEL_SERVER
You can set the advanced mode for detailed report collection. Advanced
collections can take significantly more time.
Is the advanced mode to be enabled (Y/N)?
Hit 'Return' to accept the default (N)
> Y
Specify the complete path name of the core (UNIX) / dump (Windows) file
> /SBLFS/siebelfs/core_siebelserver_siebsvc_69318_80758_1337718964_15917
Enter the process identifier of the Siebel process that crashed
> 15917
Remember to always say Y to advanced mode. This shows a lot of results and takes
up space but this is needed to generate the csv file (which we usually get from FDR).
RDA will show the results in the RDA/output folder.
Usually it is safe to ignore the log files. This is because RDA tries to get every log
file generated by each user at the time of the crash. We do not need these to analyze why
there was a crash.
The most useful files are the .htm file and .csv file.
e.g. RDA_SIEBEL01_crash.htm and RDA_SIEBEL01_R00418_core_ae7le189_siebmtshmw_69318_80758_1335387.csv
The .htm file will show the outputs from pstack, pmap, pflags ,pldd and also show the enterprise
log file name.
The csv file is what you would get if there were an fdr file generated and you converted
the fdr file to a csv file.
examples of htm and csv files generated by RDA can be found here and here.
I have masked some data in there, it was from a live environment.
The official guide to RDA is in Oracle support, document ID 1309049.1
It explains some other uses of RDA also.
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