Symantec Management Platform (SMP) Community

My team has been working on creating the selfdiagnostic tool SMPDiag.  I would love to hear if the SMPDiag has been helpful and where we can add more value.  Any comments are appriciated.  Thanks in advance.

Download: tech202997 (http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH202997)

I introduced this to my customers as soon as it came out, and they all had positive feedback for it.

There was a DS test that fails because of a certain table having a hardcoded schema, but that may have been fixed by now.

The Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down options in the tool makes it easy to report this kind of stuff.  The data can also be helpful for creating additional tests etc.

It also helps to show the usefulness of the tool and keep it progressing.

I have been running SMPDiag (now version 0.1.1203) across our SMP 7.1 servers since I returned from the Endpoint Management summit in Ready in January 2014. This tool is a must-have for all Symantec administrators.

• It appears to be safe: It runs quickly, doesn't appear to lock anything out or cause any degradation on the console whilst running.
• It is flexible - you can focus on as much or as little as you want by ticking the boxes you want to report on.
• It is intelligent enough that if you tick a box and the product is not present on the server, it works around it (i.e. it doesn't break it).
• It prioritises your attention with the categories.
• Explanations when you click on a topic are very good, with hyperlinks to relevant articles.
• SMPDiag self-updates - a very nice feature that keeps it current.
• Our DBA's won't permit us SysAdmin privs, so it took a bit of hassle to get permissions correct. I think there is one test that simply won't run without SysAdmin, so we can't run that test.
• It is great that it allows you to save reports. However a logical step beyond that is to provide a method of seeing and comparing the servers from a single place; I've done this manually but that took some time.

Tuning

• We evidently had some database issues - so changed MaxDOP=4 (was 0) and Cost Threshold = 20 (was 5). This had benefits on all our NS's, but MaxDOP=4 wasn't the optimum we found by experimentation.
• We settled on MaxDOP=8 on our Customer Facing central NS
• We settled on MaxDOP=2 on our 3 local NS's
• Evidently the way queries are submitted differs sufficiently in our environment that the Centre NS should be tuned separately from the locals.
• Interestingly, the CXPacket waits shown in SMPDiag are different from what our DBA tells us he sees on the database. I don't understand why, but this reduces trust in SMPDiag.

It's a shame the rest of Altiris isn't written this well - we wouldn't need the Diag tool if it was ;-)