Getting started with Tivoli Data Warehouse

So you login to the Tivoli Portal, click the history collection icon, and request that some history be collected.  You specify the tables to collect, define the collection interval, specify the warehouse option, and enable summarization and pruning. And finally you click the distribution tab and select the managed systems you want to collect history for.  Click 'Apply' and notice the icon to the left of your definition entry turns green.  See the example of the typical steps to enable history collection. 

Everything's great and all is now operational.  Right?  Well, maybe. 

One area of confusion for users is that when you define history collection in the Tivoli Portal, it may look like everything is being collected and you should be getting data, but when you request the data in the Tivoli Portal what you get is no data at all or various SQL errors.  You see the history icons and everything in the workspaces, but you don't get any data.  The question then becomes, what do you do next?

The thing to keep in mind is that there is infrastructure at several levels that needs to be in place for the Tivoli Data Warehouse to function as advertised.  To enable TDW you need the following infrastructure:  history collection PDS's (persistent data stores) created for the TEMAs (i.e. the agents), warehouse and summarization/pruning processes installed and enabled with the proper drivers and definitions, and finally a target database to store the data (I usually use DB2).  If any of these things is  not in place, or not correctly configured, you will probably not get the history data you are looking for. 

We will go through in subsequent posts things to look for when trying to debug TDW issues.