It is strongly advised that you run exports from BMC Atrium Discovery during time periods when no discovery runs are occurring. This ensures that the state of the datastore will not change during the export. Such a change could result in inconsistent data being exported.

There are two ways to run an export:

• From the User Interface
• From the command line

Running an Export from the User Interface

To run an exporter from the User Interface:

1. Navigate to the configuration tab page for the exporter.
2. Click on its Run link
   Only one export can be run at a time. As a result all of the other exporters' run links become unavailable when an export is running.
   The output for the currently executing exporter is displayed beneath the configuration tabs. It refreshes every few seconds, keeping the output up to date.
3. Once the export has finished, the output window displays a "No export is running" message, and will stop refreshing.
4. To re-enable the exporters' Run links, close the output window by clicking the Close button.

Running an Export from the Command Line

The export process can also be run from the appliance's command line interface. Do the following to run an export from the command line:

1. Log on to the appliance as the tideway user.
2. Run the following command (where exporter-name is the name of the exporter you want to run):
   $TIDEWAY/java/integrations/bin/export.sh exporter-name
   The export now runs and the clean log (see Log Files) is written to the console. Future exports can be scheduled using cron.

Log Files

There are two types of log files produced by the Export component.

• Export Log Files
• Other Log Files

Export Log Files

Each export writes logs to the normal BMC Atrium Discovery appliance log location.
To view the logs, select Appliance > View Logs

The following logs are written:

• Clean log – This contains information on what the exporter did with each item. These log files are called tw_cmdb-export.timestamp.log where timestamp is the data and time the export commenced.
• Full log – This contains much more verbose information about the export process. This log is intended for debugging. The full log is called tw_cmdb-export.log.

When the full log reaches 50 MB, it is rolled. That is, a .1 log number suffix is appended to its filename and existing logs have their log number suffixes incremented. The oldest log is deleted. Ten logs are retained in addition to the current log.

See the Troubleshooting section for more information on viewing BMC Atrium Discovery log data.

Other Log Files

Several other log files are also generated in the BMC Atrium Discovery Appliance log location directory.

• Startup log – When BMC Atrium Discovery is started, a component of BMC Atrium Discovery Export runs to perform some cleanup exercises. The log for this activity is in export-creds.log
• Connection test log – Whenever a user tests an adapter configuration connection, the messages for the test are written to a log called tw_exporter_connection_test.log