Siebel Remote Diagnostic Agent

When you open any SR with Oracle they expect certain inputs from you which generally includes following files.

•      Crash Files
•      Log files
•      FDR files
•      Core files 
•      Crash.txt

RDA i.e. Remote Diagnostic Agent  can be of great use to provide all the required information to Oracle experts at one go. RDA is a less known tool developed in house by Oracle engineers to collect the necessary information about your environment and issue.

Steps to setup RDA in your environment:

1) Download RDA 4.25 from support web. This is .zip file.

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/ui/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?_afrLoop=30118533417024&id=314422.1&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=8uhmykn99_123

Unzip RDA under the SIEBEL_ROOT/siebsrvr directory of the server where you had the crash. This will create directory rda under location  SIEBEL_ROOT/siebsrvr

You can refer Doc ID 314422.1 for more details.

2) Download a copy of the solgrabcore.zip file from below location.

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/downloadattachmentprocessor?attachid=477520.1:SGCzip
Now place solgrabcore.sh under the SIEBEL_ROOT/siebsrvr/bin directory.

3) Run the following command from the SIEBEL_ROOT/siebsrvr/rda directory and provide the appropriate input values:

./rda.sh -vT siebel

Note: Please note that all RDA commands and options are case sensitive.

When you run above command it will ask you for following details:

Siebel Server Home (same as SIEBEL_ROOT above)

Application Enterprise Name

Application Server Name

Advanced collection enabled –  (Select Yes)

Process Identifier

Core File location – (please verify the directory location of the core file. ensure the entire path including the core file name is provided for this value)

4) As output, zip file will be be created in rda/output directory which will contain all the details. Attach the final RDA*.zip file to the SR. The format of the file will be similar to RDA.RDA_<machine-name>.zip.

This is very handy tool and can save your lot of time that you generally waste in providing inputs to Oracle.

Steps to generate log files for Siebel Tools/Dedicated/Mobile Client

Here are the simple steps to generate Log Files for Siebel Tools and mobile/Dedicated Client.

1. Right Click on "My Computer" and select Properties.
 
2. Select the Advanced tab and open the Environmental Variables window.
 
3. Under User Variables section, create two Environmental Variables as per following :

   a) Variable = SIEBEL_LOG_DIR, Value = C:\LOG
   b) Variable = SIEBEL_LOG_EVENTS, Value = ALL

4. Click on Ok.
 
5. Create a Folder with name "LOG" in "C" drive. This is the folder, where all the logs gets generated.
 
6. Done.

Now restart the Siebel Tools/Mobile/Dedicated client and you will see a "Siebel.log" gets created under C:\LOG folder, which will help you in troubleshooting issues

Siebel Apply and Activate

All of us know, when we do any schema level changes then we have to do Apply & Activate. This post will help you to understand what exactly happens when we do Apply and Activate. 

The Apply and Activate buttons appear in the Table and Index sections of Siebel Tools. They are a means to synchronize the logical and physical schema and also to alert other users that changes have been made to the schema.
The logical schema is stored in the S_TABLE, S_COLUMN, S_INDEX and S_INDEX_COLUMN tables in the Siebel database. The physical schema is defined in the RDBMS (IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle) that is being used.
Developer does the changes in logical schema i.e. in repository. In order to those changes to be propagated to physical schema two things must happen,

1)     Siebel tools must create DDL statement corresponding to repository level change and fire that sql to the  database.This is exactly what happens when we click Apply button.

2)     Next step is to press activate button. When you click activate button, Schema version information stored in table S_APP_VER changes.

All Siebel components gets information about physical schema from diccache.dat file which resides in siebel server bin directory. This file also contains information about schema version.
Every Siebel component compares schema version information in diccache.dat file with schema information in S_APP_VER table before using schema definitions in deccache.dat file.
So in case you have any new changes and if you have Applied and Activated those changes using Siebel tools, schema version information in S_APP_VER table and dicache.dat will not match and Siebel will recreate diccache.dat file. Newly created diccache.dat file will have latest schema changes. So every time you do any change in logical schema (Repository) you have to perform Apply & Activate.