Oracle Enterprise Manager has been around for more than a decade, and many database administrators around the world have used one or more Enterprise Manager products for running their databases more efficiently. Over the past few years, Enterprise Managers have made a big push to manage middleware and applications as well. This has helped change the original market perception that Enterprise Manager was simply a DBA’s best friend.
With its flagship Grid Control product release 10.2.0.5 (released on Linux platforms in February 2009), Enterprise Manager has strengthened its previous offerings in the middleware area. Enterprise Manager’s strategic direction is consistent with the one charted out by Oracle after completing the BEA acquisition on April 29, 2008. The greatest improvements have been made in managing WebLogic Server, and the Oracle SOA platform that includes Oracle BPEL Process Manager, and Oracle Service Bus (formerly AquaLogic Service Bus).
Enterprise Manager has made several acquisitions in the past two years to complement existing capabilities and provide a complete management solution to users. Auptyma was the first of these acquisitions, which provided deep Java diagnostic capabilities without instrumentation or overhead in production environments. The product was renamed to Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J). Separately, Moniforce was acquired to manage an end user’s experience while interacting with an application and service providers, and the product was renamed to Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). Another key acquisition was ClearApp—a company that provided technology to model and monitor composite applications. The product was renamed to Composite Application Modeler and Monitor (CAMM).
Several integration challenges lie ahead, and many still think of Enterprise Manager as a database management solution. The product has grown considerably faster in the past two years, especially in the middleware, SOA, and application space. Enterprise Manager is one of the top product lines at Oracle, but is still the best kept secret in the Oracle portfolio. With a vast array of product lines, it is important for an Oracle customer’s IT to manage these product lines centrally, and with a low cost of ownership. The big four management vendors (CA, IBM, HP, BMC) have broad product offerings that are not optimized for Oracle products. Further, the pure play vendors are focused on niche areas, and do not provide an enterprise management solution. Oracle Enterprise Manager plays an important role for enterprises that have one or more Oracle products in their data center, as well as non-Oracle products.
If you are involved with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle SOA Suite, or Oracle Service Bus, then you are the right candidate for this book. You are an even better candidate if you support the operational infrastructure for any of these products. For a long time, application and SOA administrators have longed for visibility into the distributed service-based environment. If you or your team supports any of these products in a production environment, you will know the pain of dealing with day-to-day operational issues. This book will go a long way to alleviate some of those problems using Enterprise Manager capabilities.
If you are an SOA architect or associated with SOA governance in any way (for example, an SOA Center of Excellence), this book will serve as an eye opener to the many features available to gain production assurance in complex SOA environments. This will help you govern the SOA environment in conjunction with other tools such as Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER), Oracle Service Registry (OSR), and Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM). However, this book shall focus on runtime SOA management with Enterprise Manager Grid Control.
If you like a functional approach to solving your operational problems, this is the right book for you. You will find that the book avoids lecturing on concepts, and takes a direct approach to solving real operational problems.
A general awareness of service-oriented architecture is expected, as well as an awareness of the Oracle SOA products such as BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus. No specific management or operational expertise is required. This book will help set up the framework for managing the Oracle SOA products using a step-by-step functional-based approach.
This book contains details on how to set up and automate various operational tasks essential for the smooth running of Oracle SOA products in production. It will walkthrough step-by-step exercises to assist the administrator in managing these products from a single web-based console. It will relieve the administrator from performing mundane time-consuming repetitive tasks.
The book avoids going through explanations on SOA, BPEL, or Service Bus. This is not the right book if you want to develop BPEL and OSB services from tools such as JDeveloper. Also, it avoids talking about basic Grid Control product issues such as download and installation, other than the first chapter.
The introductory chapter contains basic information that is a prerequisite for the other chapters. You can dive into the other chapters on a need basis, based on what you would like to accomplish. All chapters have a problem statement defined, along with a summary of the solution provided. The solution itself is a step-by-step walkthrough on how to accomplish certain tasks to solve the problem.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section covers the management of BPEL Process Manager with Grid Control. The second section focuses on management of SOA Suite in general. The third section covers management of Oracle Service Bus.
Chapter 1, Grid Control, BPEL, and OSB Overview, gives a basic introduction to Grid Control that includes download, installation, and basic configuration. This is the foundation technology that provides the infrastructure for managing various targets from a single console.
Chapter 2, Discovering BPEL PM, talks about the discovery and configuration of the BPEL Process Manager target. Discovery of BPEL PM as a Grid Control-managed target is the first step before performing other management tasks.
Chapter 3, BPEL Process Monitoring, talks about viewing deployed BPEL processes and their constituent partner links. It goes on to talk about monitoring of BPEL processes and partner links using a combination of metrics and synthetic tests.
Chapter 4, BPEL Infrastructure Management, describes how to manage the underlying infrastructure components such as BPEL Process Manager server, dehydration database, Application Server, host, and so on. Administrators can manage several disparate systems in groups, reducing the time to detect the root cause of system-related problems.
Chapter 5, BPEL Service-Level Management, describes how to set service-level expectations for BPEL Processes, partner links, and tracking those levels through various metrics. This enables the service providers to monitor agreed-upon contractual guarantees with service consumers.
Chapter 6, BPEL Services Dashboard, illustrates that dashboards are important to visualize service-level performance and metrics for key services. This chapter also walks through how to construct a simple dashboard to show all critical services, and their top metrics, including service levels. Operations typically use this to keep a ready eye on services and act on any deviations from expected SLAs.
Chapter 7, BPEL Deployment Automation, shows deployment of BPEL artifacts is a repetitive and time-consuming task. This chapter describes how to deploy BPEL artifacts to multiple servers in an automated fashion. This ensures deployments are conducted in an error-free manner, and reduces overall scheduled downtime.
Chapter 8, BPEL Configuration Management, describes how to manage the configuration settings of the BPEL infrastructure, including setting baselines, and comparisons. This helps to diagnose problems due to configuration changes as well as standardize configurations across the enterprise.
Chapter 9, SOA Suite Cloning, discusses cloning as a complex administrative task that needs deep product expertise. This chapter walks through a simple scenario to clone an existing SOA Suite from one instance to another. Administrators can use this to perform critical time-consuming tasks in a standardized, error-free manner.
Chapter 10, Web Application Monitoring, describes how to set and monitor Web services using Grid Control service models, SLA rules, and synthetic tests. Web applications can also be monitored—including the recording and playback of HTTP(s) transactions to troubleshoot problems. Application administrators can proactively monitor applications from an end-user perspective.
Chapter 11, Discovery of WebLogic and OSB targets, talks about managing multiple WebLogic domains and OSB instances from a single console, as it is a frequent problem for the middleware administrator. Middleware administrators can use a single console to manage all their installations, perform complex management tasks, and dive into their respective WebLogic or OSB console to perform administrative activities. All of this enables the administrator to standardize management tasks, and hence the behavior of WebLogic and OSB servers, leading to increased uptime.
Chapter 12, OSB Deployment Automation, discusses that deployment of OSB projects and resources to multiple domains can be cumbersome and time consuming. This chapter walks through typical deployment scenarios and how they can be automated using the deployment procedure framework. This enables infrastructure teams to standardize deployments, as well as to track and manage artifacts centrally.
Chapter 13, OSB Proxy and Business Service Monitoring, walks the reader through Oracle Service Bus services that provide a versatile frontend plumbing layer to standardize messages from various sources and differing formats. Any performance bottleneck directly relates to a slowdown in critical backend business processes. This chapter also covers the monitoring capabilities for OSB proxy and business services. These provide the administrator with visibility into the runtime behavior, and take proactive steps to maintain a high-performing environment.
Chapter 14, WebLogic and OSB Configuration Management, describes that configuration changes are a major cause of downtimes in production environments. This chapter also covers WebLogic and OSB configuration tracking, viewing changes, and comparing and saving configurations. This enables administrators to resolve problems quickly and standardize a set of configurations across the enterprise.
The target product versions used throughout this book are installed on Oracle Enterprise Linux platform and share an Oracle database 10.2.0.2 as the common repository. For the first two sections, Oracle SOA Suite is used as the target. SOA Suite 10.1.3.x is installed in a single node environment on Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.x. The popular SOA Order Booking application is used throughout the book to illustrate various features. Oracle Service Bus 10gR3 installed on WebLogic Server 10gR3 is used as the target for the third section. The Mortgage Broker application is used to illustrate various features.
Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5 or 10.2.0.5 is used in all the exercises. It is installed with a single Oracle Managed Server (OMS) and two agents—one for the SOA Suite and another one for Oracle Service Bus.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Select bpel_parallel_flow.jar for the current example."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "From the BPEL target home page, click on the Processes tab".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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