TSAMP maintenance and diagnostics

You’ve set your TSAMP environment on Linux and DB2. Tested a few failover scenarios and everything is looking positive.  

One of the key things about TSAMP and DB2  is maintaining the environment. Finding any small problems before they become big problems.

For example, monitoring message logs and backing up copies of configuration and state files can save you lots of work when troubleshooting.

These are some guidelines to follow, which will give you a firm basis. There are different ways of using the information, but I like to create reports , which are reviewed and apply any fixes

1. Before making any SAMP change , save the a backup copy of the current SAMP policy.Don’t forget to also backup the SAMP policy after you’ve made the change. Compare the current SAMP policy to the backup SAMP policy every time there is an HA incident.
The command to save the SAMP policy is on How to backup the TSA SAMP policy details
2. Investigate every process id which blocks or interferes with the tsamp commands.
3. Further to point 1 – maintain backup copies of db2nodes.cfg and db2ha.sys
Db2nodes.cfg is normally found in the $INSTHOME/sqllib folder
Db2ha.sys  is normally found  in $INSTHOME/sqllib/cfg/db2ha.sys
4. Save backup copies of db2pd -ha output before and after every SAMP change. Compare the current db2pd outputs to the backup db2pd outputs every time there is an HA incident. db2pd troubleshooting guide - DBA DB2
5. Save backup copies of the samdiag outputs. Samdiag gives detailed information about the resources  and requires root authority
6. TSA actively writes to log files. Regularly monitor   the History file , which logs commands sent to TSA
/var.ct/IBM.RecoveryRM.log
7. The Linux Error logs display the start.stor,monitor scripts output.  When diagnosing an outage or similar use the Linux error logs to gather information.  They are normally found on /var/log/messages

For more detailed information on TSAMP commands read TSAMP Cheat Sheet for DBA managing DB2 clustering - DBA DB2

Read More on TSAMP diagnostics

Methods to find TSAMP error details and return codes