Oracle delivers several consoles that can be used for the purpose of monitoring; however, each console has its purpose and its own strengths. It is therefore important to understand the capabilities and constraints within these consoles before defining a support model. The following list provides a summary of the consoles that are available out of the box within the products:
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control: This console delivers an SOA infrastructure, monitoring the capabilities for a single WebLogic domain. Through this console, an administrator would be able to perform tasks such as:
- Creation and deletion of partitions
- Managing the composite state (activating, retiring, starting, stopping, and setting the default composite version)
- Deletion and termination of composite instances
- Deployment, undeployment, and redeployment actions for SOA composite applications.
- Export of a deployed SOA composite application to a JAR file.
- Manual initiation of SOA composite application test instances from the Test Web Service page.
- Recovery from faults in SOA composite applications, service components, service engines, and business events.
- Manual recovery of failed messages in BPEL processes.
- Automated unit testing of SOA composite applications.
- Attachment of policies to SOA composite applications, service components, and binding components.
- Incoming and outgoing notification messages in human workflow.
- Subscriptions to business events and testing of event publications.
- Publication of web services to the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registry.
- Disabling of business monitors (BPEL sensors, BPEL monitors, and BPMN measurements).
- Storage of instance and callback message data in Oracle Coherence distributed cache on Oracle Exalogic platforms.
- Management of the Oracle SOA Suite plugin introspected by Oracle Virtual Assembly BuilderSource: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/admin.1111/e10226/soasuite_intro.htm
#CEGFCGAH.Tip
This console is not to be confused with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12 c (formerly known in previous versions as Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 11 g ) that delivers multi-domain and multi-environment monitoring capabilities.
For further information on monitoring SOA services with Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control please refer to section 6 Monitoring SOA Composite Applications of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administration Guide for SOA and BPM Suite http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/admin.1111/e10226/soacompapp_mon.htm#CJHGFICD
- OSB Console: This console delivers extended monitoring and management capabilities specifically for Oracle Service Bus. Some of the most notable capabilities of this console are:
- Gather statistics about message invocations, errors, performance characteristics, messages passed, and SLA violations
- Send SLA-based alerts as SNMP traps, enabling integration with third-party ESM solutions
- Support for logging selected parts of messages for both systems operations and business auditing purposes
- Search capabilities by extracting key information from a message and use as it as a search index
Tip
For further information on using the OSB Console, please refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administration Guide for OSB http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/admin.1111/e15867/intro_console.htm
- WebLogic Console: This console is mainly used to manage a WebLogic domain, including the domain administration server and all of its managed servers and clusters. The WebLogic Console is a great tool for managing the WebLogic infrastructure and also for monitoring the server health of the applications running in it. However, the console is not focused on managing an SOA infrastructure and, although monitoring services is possible, administrators should use the more intuitive Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. So in summary, this tool should be used for administration of WebLogic domains and its servers and clusters, but when it comes to managing services, Enterprise Manager is the recommended option.
Tip
For further information on the WebLogic Console, please refer to the WebLogic Administration Console Online Help http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/apirefs.1111/e13952/core/index.html
- JRockit Mission Control: JRockit Mission Control is a utility that comes as part of the JRockit JDK and that allows for in-depth monitoring of Java Virtual Machines. It includes tools to monitor, manage, profile, and eliminate memory leaks in your Java application without introducing the performance overhead normally associated with these types of tools. This tool is usually used during performance tuning of your system or for general monitoring purposes of the JRockit JVM's supporting the different SOA infrastructures.
Tip
For further information on the JRockit Mission Control please refer to http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E15289_01/doc.40/e15067/intro.htm#CEGIAGIG
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM): Unlike any of the previously mentioned consoles, BAM is really an application that delivers a comprehensive framework to create user-friendly dashboards that are updated in near real-time. The main difference between BAM and any other console is that in order for BAM to deliver useful content, sensors need to be added into the desired SOA composites that are specifically configured to gather (or sense) information, and send it to a BAM data source that would then be used to generate different dashboards with any desired different dimension. BAM is a powerful tool if used properly, and it can be used for a series of use cases such as monitoring Key Performance Indicators in near real-time, service SLAs, and any other meaningful business-driven dashboard.
Tip
For further information on BAM please refer to the Oracle Business Activity Monitoring documentation http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bam/documentation/documentation-089589.html
In addition to the consoles mentioned previously, there are two additional tools that although do not come as part of the main SOA Suite product installation, do add a lot of value to an SOA Governance implementations:
- Oracle Enterprise Manager Enterprise Edition: OEM Grind Control 11g (OEM GC) or its latest version OEM Cloud Control 12c (OEM CC) is a powerful tool, to monitor an entire Oracle solution and all of its technology stacks. Depending on what part of the stack is to be monitored, different management packs may be required. Management packs are add-ons to the base product, and enable OEM to fully monitor and manage different technologies.
- Oracle Business Transaction Manager (BTM): This tool allows for the SOA business transactions to be monitored end-to-end, regardless of which system is executing the transaction. By making use of the observers deployed into the different systems involved in operating a transaction (for example, OSB, SOA Suite, JMS queues, J2EE applications, or even .NET applications), BTM generates at runtime a full end-to-end view of the transaction and then allows for different monitoring capabilities such as SLA alerts, exception handling to mention a few, to be configured.