Enhancing the performance of Server Automation

To ensure that you minimize the impact on performance, you need to understand the limits and capacity constraints of the IBM® BigFix architecture. This section describes how the IBM BigFix capacity constraints are relevant to BigFix Lifecycle Server Automation. Use the information described here to ensure that your system is tuned for optimum performance.

Actions

To ensure that your system is configured for optimum performance, you need to complete maintenance tasks on existing actions in the system. A large number of actions on the system affects system performance. The number of open actions on the system affects system resources. Closed actions also use system resources, as the system reports on all closed actions.

Try to ensure that the maximum number of open actions on the system does not exceed 2,500. As the number of open actions on the system exceeds 2,500, system performance is adversely affected. It is important to note that the Automation Plan Engine automatically generates actions as it processes the Automation Plans that you create. Therefore, you might need to check the number of open actions on the system more regularly than if you were creating actions manually.

Important: There is a potential performance impact associated with using the Enable prefetching option because an additional action is created for each step that requires software downloads. The recommended maximum number of open actions on the system is 2,500. For any given Automation Plan, an action is open for the Automation Plan and also for each individual step in the Automation Plan. If you use the Enable prefetching option, additional actions are created and opened for each step that requires software downloads. So instead of having two open actions per Automation Plan at any one point (one action for the Automation Plan and one for the current step) there are additional actions opened for each step that requires software downloads.
To check the number of open actions on the system, complete the following:
  1. From the IBM BigFix console, click the BigFix Management domain.
  2. Click Deployment Health Checks.
  3. Navigate to the Deployment Optimization section.
  4. Expand the Open Actions node. The system provides information about the number of actions currently open. Review the results and identify if you need to take action.
Try to ensure that the number of closed actions on the system does not exceed 10,000. To check the number of closed actions on the system, complete the following:
  1. From the IBM BigFix console, click the BigFix Management domain.
  2. Click Deployment Health Checks.
  3. Navigate to the BES Console Health section.
  4. Expand the Stopped And Expired Actions section. Review the results and decide if you need to take action.

To reduce the number of closed actions, you can delete the actions from the server. However, when you delete actions from the server, they remain on the database. To completely remove closed actions, you can purge the actions from the system.

When you are designing your Automation Plan, make sure that you design your action applicability so that you are targeting only relevant endpoints. Ensure that the Site to which you publish your actions is suitable for the endpoints you want to target for Server Automation. For example, many of the endpoints on your network might not be relevant targets for your Automation Plan. Therefore, it is advisable to publish your actions to a more specific group of computers, such as servers.

Each Automation Plan is a Fixlet. To ensure that your Automation Plans are not evaluated by non-relevant endpoints, store your Automation Plans in a site that is not subscribed to by IBM BigFix endpoints.