Book Image

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook

Book Image

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook

Overview of this book

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is the backbone of messaging and application integration in a service-oriented architecture. An application administrator is responsible for an end-to-end administration and management of the infrastructure. Understanding the underlying components, services, and configuration and their relations to each other is necessary to effectively administer the Oracle SOA Suite 11g environment. Due to its sheer size, administering Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a daunting task.This book provides detailed explanations of all the core administrative and management activities around Oracle SOA Suite. It includes compact information for end-to-end administration of Oracle SOA Suite 11g. It delves into advanced topics such as silent installs, cloning, backup and recovery and high availability installations.Using this book, you will be able to administer and secure your Oracle SOA Suite services and applications. You will follow examples that you can use in your everyday life as a SOA Suite administrator. The book begins with managing composite applications, their deployments and lifecycles and then moves on to monitoring instances, service engines, Weblogic Server and composite applications. With a detailed coverage of topics like the administration of individual service components as well as configuring MBeans using both Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control and WLST-based scripts, you will be equipped to work with any services and applications.Towards the end, you will be taken through identifying faults & exceptions, troubleshooting approaches, and securing various components.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Monitoring the SOA platform—centralized management and monitoring


Monitoring in Oracle SOA Suite 11g enables closed loop governance by connecting design-time with runtime. Once services, their metadata, and associated policies are deployed, they begin to be automatically monitored and managed by the service infrastructure by regularly updating the console with a scorecard of runtime metrics collected.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g runs on top of numerous infrastructure components that include database management systems, J2EE compliant application servers and centralized identity management solutions. All Oracle SOA Suite 11g components have specific functions for administering and managing parts of an SOA infrastructure, each from a different perspective or for a different audience. In order to address the monitoring and management challenges described earlier, several areas need to be considered:

  • Monitoring solutions need to be provided at an enterprise level that encompass all related applications. This can begin with monitoring composite endpoints as well as the overall operational health of the infrastructure.

  • Real-time monitoring and proactive alerting based on runtime statistics of configured KPIs, availability, performance metrics, and service level agreements should be implemented.

  • Reporting of important information in the message (that is, payload), captured as a part of reporting functionality, can aid system administrators in better analysis and troubleshooting.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, the web-based console into all Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrative functions, enables a bird's-eye view of your processes and their instances through a centralized management and monitoring console. It organizes a wide variety of performance data and administrative functions into distinct, web-based home pages. These home pages make it easy to locate the most important monitoring and performance data, and the most commonly used administrative functions for any Fusion Middleware component—all from your web browser!

Via Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, you can browse running servers, applications, and service engines to easily recognize and troubleshoot runtime problems in the SOA platform. As depicted in the following screenshot, the dashboard provides a comprehensive snapshot of the environment, including recent composite instances, state of currently deployed composites, and recently faulted transactions and their errors. From here, we typically drill down as necessary.

With out-of-the-box functionality provided by Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, you can obtain a real-time end-to-end view of the business transaction for SLA management, fault tracing, and problem determination, including the following:

  • Web services message processing totals and processing times

  • Transaction discovery/availability/state/status

  • Transaction performance

  • SOA registry and security

  • Service discovery and relationship/dependency mapping

  • Transaction audit trail and flow, faults, and rejected messages

  • JMX-based monitoring of all components of the SOA infrastructure

In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides a comprehensive infrastructure management console that includes the following capabilities:

  • Code deployment and undeployment

  • Startup and shut down

  • Performance, metrics, and transaction monitoring

  • Security and policy management

  • Log management

  • Instance monitoring and management

  • Runtime exceptions and fault management

  • Diagnostics and tuning

  • Browsing, viewing, and modifying runtime MBeans

  • Web service testing

The following diagram shows the runtime architecture of Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. It describes how Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control aggregates runtime metrics from different components.

Several internal services are leveraged to automatically collect these metrics behind the scenes:

  • Oracle Process Manager and Notification (OPMN): OPMN is responsible for aggregation of component status, runtime metrics, and component logs, and provides a central access point for this information. It can also act as an agent that can start/stop registered components.

  • Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS): DMS hooks up with the runtime MBeans of all participating managed servers controlled by Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. This MBean periodically collects performance and monitoring statistics for all available components, and makes it available for the DMS collection MBeans on the Admin Server.

  • Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL): ODL is a standard Java API utility framework that is leveraged in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control to log diagnostic messages in a standard format across each domain.

Apart from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, there are a host of other management and monitoring frameworks available to administer various facets of your SOA infrastructure to help pinpoint issues. This includes JRockit Mission Control, WebLogic Diagnostics Framework (WLDF), Weblogic Scripting Tool (WLST), Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and more. Although these frameworks and tools are beyond the scope of this book, the following diagram provides a holistic view of each of these frameworks: