Ian Goldstein's Blog

Importing your Guardian 1.0 workspace into Guardian 1.1

2008-03-31T23:53:18Z

This plugin imports a Guardian 1.0 workspace into the current workspace of a Guardian 1.1 installation. It updates the Guardian 1.1 registry and copies the 1.0 workspace into the 1.1 workspace.

To import your Guardian 1.0 workspace into Guardian 1.1:

Install Guardian 1.1.
Download com.bea.guardian.ui.importing_1.0.0.jar.
Copy the jar into the plugins directory in your Guardian 1.1 installation, e.g. C:/Program Files/Guardian/plugins.
Start Guardian 1.1.
From the File menu, select Import then Guardian 1.0 Workspace. Follow the instructions in the wizard to complete the import.

You asked for it! Guardian 1.1 delivers.

2008-03-31T05:37:55Z

Maybe you're comfortable with your WebLogic Server installation and deployments. Maybe you've got a crack team of administrators keeping your software stack healthy. But maybe something changes.

Did someone apply a patch to a server or JVM without following your change control process? Did you forget to integrate a configuration change from your dev box to your system test environment?

Guardian 1.1 (GA on March 31, 2008) introduces the "Compare" feature, which allows you to diff an inventory, evaluation or snapshot against an earlier instance, or even across two different domains.

Guardian 1.1 is our first major new feature release, so we are very excited to bring customers this new functionality which has been one of our biggest customer enhancement requests.

Another popular customer enhancement request has been around the concept of ignoring certain signatures. Sometimes your own best practices are at odds with BEA recommended best practices. Now, with the Guardian 1.1 release, you can simply right-click on that signature and set an IGNORE annotation.

We went a little further, though, with the concept of signature annotations in 1.1. "Ignore" is really just a special case of the more general annotation feature, which actually lets you flag signatures with any kind of extra information or notes that might be meaningful for you and your team associated with that signature. Try it out, and share in the comments how you're using annotations in Guardian 1.1.

For more information on Guardian 1.1, visit Guardian's home page and the latest Guardian blast.

Guardian 1.1 Announcement

2007-12-12T18:08:09Z

This just in from BEA World Shanghai -- BEA Guardian v1.1 launches next spring. In addition to being available free of charge, it will also be available bundled with future WebLogic Server versions. Together, we will be able to help more customers avert more threats to uptime.

Have you your downloaded your free copy of Guardian yet?

Free as in beer!

2007-12-12T17:59:12Z

Those of us who have been talking about pre-emptive support for a while now have always felt confident that we could help our customers achieve better (i.e. more stable, faster, more manageable) deployments of BEA products.

Well the data is in, from almost a year of real live customers using BEA Guardian:

over 4700 potential Support issues prevented by BEA Guardian to date
average case closure time drops by 88% (!!!) when customers use BEA Guardian

So now we're taking the lid off this thing: BEA Guardian is now free for all customers with a BEA support contract. Download your copy today.

Reduce the Risk from Changes to US Daylight Savings Time

2007-03-02T16:03:43Z

The US Energy Policy Act of 2005 resulted in changes to the timing of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States. These changes could have a serious impact on your systems and are effective as of March 11, 2007.

Customers running BEA Guardian with the March 9th signature release (1.0.3) will have this issue automatically identified. (If you're already running Guardian, just click "Update" to get the latest signatures.) In addition, they will be provided with notification of specific instances where it is a threat and offered recommended solutions.

WebLogic Server relies on the time conversion functions provided by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for reporting the local time. If your system relies on the US time zone calendar, the underlying JVM being used by WebLogic Server must be upgraded. These DST time zone changes have been incorporated into the following JVM releases:

Sun JDK 1.4.2_11
Sun JDK 1.5.0_06
BEA JRockit 1.4.2_11 R26.4 and later
BEA JRockit 1.5.0_06 R26.3 and later

Check out BEA Guardian at http://www.bea.com/support/guardian to learn more about how Guardian can protect you.

Signatures are easy to write... earn $50 for your idea!

2007-02-16T22:24:36Z

Think about the last support case you had to open for one of your BEA products. If it's been a while, you can always jog your memory by logging into eSupport to look at your case histories.

Now think about what caused the problem you reported. Was some part of your system configuration just a little off? Was there a software bug? Was there some problem in the interaction between your BEA product and another vendor's software or hardware? How would you describe the problem in one sentence?

When the Developer Relations Engineer (DRE) started working on your case, what did you talk about? Odds are good that at the very least, you identified the product versions and some of the configuration settings in play.

Could the same problem occur somewhere else in your environment? What conditions would you need to identify in order to determine that?

Finally, what did you do to resolve the issue? For example, did you modify a configuration setting? Was a patch or maintenance pack identified? Did you make any changes to other 3rd party products to integrate with your BEA products?

OK, you're done!

That's all it takes to submit an entry to the Guardian Signature Sweepstakes. You can submit up to three entries per day for a chance to win a Ducati racing super-bike or US $30,000 in cash. If you're one of the first 500 qualifying submissions, you also get a $50 American Express gift certificate.

How many signature ideas can you come up with now?

What about some of the issues you were able to resolve yourself (perhaps only after some time-consuming research and troubleshooting)? Wouldn't it be nice to have a signatures for these kinds of issues, too?

Download BEA Guardian here to see how we're using signatures today to help you identify problems before they occur.

Preemptive Support

2007-01-25T19:54:46Z

What It Isn't
Traditional customer support in the software industry has always been reactive: you encounter some problem, you do a bunch of time-consuming research and troubleshooting, you report it to your vendor's support organization. You wait for a resolution.

What It Is
Pre-emptive support turns that model on its head by using software to check for potential problems before they become actual problems. BEA Guardian is that software.

How Does It Work?
Let's start with the facts: software vendors' support organizations know a lot about the kinds of issues you encounter when you run their products, and the experts in the support organization know how to resolve those issues. The problem has always been about how to share or distribute that vast collection of specialized knowledge and expertise to the right customers. BEA Guardian solves that problem: each potential problem is encapsulated and described in a signature. Guardian evaluates signatures against your target systems and makes specific recommendations for how to avoid the problems you may encounter.

What is a Signature?
A signature is an XML document which describes a potential problem. It includes instructions for Guardian to determine whether this signature is "detected" in your target system, and each signature provides user-friendly recommendations for how to resolve any issues that are detected.

BEA Support has already written lots of useful signatures which are helping our customers prevent potential problems from becoming actual problems. Do you want to help us? Check out the Guardian Signature Sweepstakes.