Overview of the IBM i Administration Runtime Expert

The IBM i Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) provides the ability to ensure your environment and application attributes remain in a consistent and expected state. Using ARE, you set up templates that define the attributes you want to verify, run the verification against your own partition or groups of partitions and review reports on any differences that are identified.

ARE has many use cases. Some examples include using ARE to ensure your system settings are unchanged, ensure multiple partitions have consistent configurations, track application and object attributes to determine if something has changed when application issues arise, verify settings for compliance requirements, and more.
ARE consists of two parts:

1. The console, which provides the user interface to create templates, set up groups of systems, run or schedule verifications and review the resulting reports. The console is delivered in the 5733-ARE licensed program product and only needs to be installed on a partition where you will use the GUI. The LPP is available at no charge and can be downloaded from the ESS site. The IBMARE web server must be started to access the console.
2. The core runtime, which is the code that runs the verifications. I often refer to this as the ARE runtime engine. This functionality is part of the base operating system, so no additional products are required to run verifications on endpoint systems.

Getting started with ARE isn’t difficult, but it does take a little time and effort to become knowledgeable about all the attributes you can verify. The set is extensive and includes the following:

• System values and network attributes
• Environment variables
• An extensive set of application and object attributes
• Configuration files
• IBM Products and PTFs
• Network configuration and ports
• User profile attributes
• CL Commands or QShell scripts to easily check on a variety of information
• SQL Query verifier, to verify attributes you can access via SQL (e.g., IBM i Services)
• And anything else you can imagine with custom plugins

I will be doing a Power Virtual User Group technical webinar on April 21 on “Everything You Need to Know About IBM i Administration Runtime Expert.” Attend this technical webinar where I will demo most of the features of ARE. If you need further assistance in getting started with ARE, please contact me.

Related Reading

Uncovering Application Runtime Expert
The Story of the Administration Runtime Expert
Managing PTFs
Network Health Checker
Damaged Object Detection