How To Be a Good Technical Consultant (IBM Security Solutions)

A good technical consultant should develop troubleshooting skills. Over the course of my professional career, I have seen many technical people who don’t even bother to read release notes or installation instructions and jump into installation and configuration which in my opinion is not a best practice. Similarly, there are people when they face any issue in coding a workflow or configuring an assembly line they consult directly with a senior consultant without checking the logs for errors.

Logs are a great source to identify the problem when it comes to troubleshooting. We should always consult the log files to look for errors before posting a technical problem on forums or contacting a technical support. To completely understand the problem, one also needs to understand the logical meaning of basic errors, i.e. Null pointer exception, Java out of memory etc. Sometimes a minor mistake can take hours to fix. So a good consultant should always follow the release notes, installation guide and when it comes to troubleshooting, product LOGS are your best friend.  

Overall logging mechanism has been improved for ISIM virtual appliance, it has been simplified and is easy to increase the log level from Appliance LMI. For SDS (Security Directory Server) lbmslapd.log file present in instance’s home folder records every detail related to the instance. DB2 diagnostic log file db2diag.log present in the home folder of db2 instance, records errors related to the DB2 instance. ISIM adapter logs are recorded in the ibmdi.log file present in the folder timsol inside the TDI installation directory. There is a log configuration file log4j.properties in the same location by which log level can be increased for adapters. I hope this article helps technical consultants working on IBM Security products.