Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook

The very nature of SOA involves implementation of services that are distributed and loosely coupled, and thus monitoring these services is complex due to the involvement of disparate systems that may include external systems and external resources (for example, messaging queues, databases, and so on). Tracing transactions across a loosely coupled implementation, particularly if it involves invocations to external systems, is extremely complicated. The reusable nature of SOA increases the importance of managing availability and performance of these services and greatly increases the need for closed loop governance. In order to achieve the desired Quality of Service (QoS), each service endpoint must literally be managed like a resource. Managed services should have near zero downtime, performance metrics, and a defined service level agreement. In a composite service's infrastructure, it's necessary to monitor and manage the end-to-end view of the systems, as well as provide detailed information about the performance and availability metrics of individual services. Each part of the overall SOA system can appear healthy while individual service transactions can be suffering.

Another important aspect of SOA monitoring is logging. The distributed nature of SOA makes a standardized logging approach difficult to implement. In addition to monitoring services in real time, the administrator is also required to perform standard administrative duties such as backups, code deployments, performance tuning, purging of old data, and more. In general, SOA infrastructure administrators are swamped with the following tasks and activities:

This book is intended to provide you, the Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrator, with a thorough understanding of how to perform each of these tasks and activities.

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:

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:

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. Oracle has put in the effort to make this stack robust, extensible, and agile, in part by including some of the best technologies available on the market. Instead of cobbling together enterprise solutions from disparate vendors and products, Oracle SOA Suite 11g provides you with a unified product suite to meet all of your SOA needs. This results in a single design-time experience, single runtime infrastructure, and end-to-end monitoring that greatly simplifies the building, maintenance, and monitoring of distributed SOA implementations.

The following diagram shows how Oracle SOA Suite 11g brings out a seamless integration capability for an enterprise wide SOA adoption and implementation by using an array of standard components suited to achieve a specific business objective:

Here are some points about the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure stack:

Oracle SOA Suite 11g relies on 100 percent standard integration approaches using BPEL, BPMN, JCA, J2EE, and web services, and hence extending its reach to other service-based and process-centric applications. This makes it highly pluggable with your existing enterprise IT infrastructure. Oracle SOA Suite 11g can be installed to run on any number of standards compliant application servers including Oracle WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere, and Red Hat JBoss, and can run on any number of certified database management systems such as the Oracle Database, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server.

What differentiates Oracle SOA Suite 11g from other comparable products on the market is the consolidation of the stack into a unified service platform that translates into major user benefits. Service Component Architecture (SCA), an emerging standard, is the key enabler here. SCA enables you to manage, version, and deploy components and metadata as a single unit. All artifacts are stored in a single repository, the Metadata Store (MDS). But the story doesn't stop here, Oracle SOA Suite 11g also consolidates all the runtime into a modular architecture of engines plugging into a common service infrastructure. And the engine consolidation naturally leads to a rationalization of the monitoring infrastructure, still maintaining a vendor neutral J2EE platform! All of this translates into numerous design-time, runtime, and monitoring benefits, many of which we will explore throughout this book.

Performance means different things to different people. For some, it translates to transaction response time, while others view it as the volume of work that can be processed within a given time period. In order to maximize performance, you will need to monitor, analyze, and tune all of the components that make up your application and infrastructure.

Performance of your SOA composites can be directly impacted by the design and implementation of the SOA code itself, the setting and configuration of the service infrastructure, or performance of external resources such as services or queues. Where do you begin to identify the performance bottleneck?

Fortunately, Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides a single tool that you require to capture key information such as WebLogic Server performance statistics and composite performance details. The following screenshot highlights the capturing of performance snapshots by using Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control:

It is also important to understand that performance tuning is an iterative process. You need to make the adjustments, measure the impact, and then perform an analysis before possibly making further adjustments, and so on. Due to the varying expectations of a performant system, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that works well in every environment. Improving performance is a process of learning and testing.

Chapter 4, Tuning Oracle SOA Suite 11g for Optimum Performance provides detail on how to tune the performance of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g service infrastructure. It will describe the various knobs that you can adjust, and when and how you might want to adjust them. It is not unusual to obtain considerable performance gains by implementing certain settings or applying specific configurations. Though tuning the service infrastructure is not the only area that impacts performance, it is undoubtedly a key area.

The typical software development lifecycle is comprised of multiple phases such as requirements, analysis, design, development, testing, and promotion. Within the Oracle SOA development lifecycle, deployment and runtime management tend to introduce certain complexities. As an SOA composite is being developed, it may reference an endpoint (effectively a fully qualified URL) on a development server. This reference will need to change as the composite is promoted to higher up environments such as test and production. For example, your developers may have developed code that processes payments against PayPal. Naturally, they would be pointing to the PayPal sandbox server at https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/2.0/ during development. What happens when this code is deployed to production? How are these references automatically updated to reference the PayPal production servers?

Oracle SOA Suite 11g offers comprehensive lifecycle management features starting from development, packaging, deployment, and post-deployment:

The following screenshot illustrates how a developer IDE such as JDeveloper (top-left) is used to build and compile SOA composites that can eventually be packed and deployed as a JAR file to the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure for execution. The composites along with their instances can be instantaneously managed and monitored from the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console (bottom-left).

For managing your complete end-to-end lifecycle, you can also consider an enterprise repository solution such as the Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER), which integrates with JDeveloper and related tools. It provides a system of record for all SOA asset information, automatically detects usage of these artifacts, tracks compliance, as well as many other governance capabilities and features. OER focuses on the SOA governance aspect of the lifecycle, but is not part of Oracle SOA Suite 11g or its infrastructure. Additional information on Oracle Enterprise Repository can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/soa/repository/index.html.

Automating application deployments and migrations through continuous integration

One of the key principles of SOA is that systems are no longer built to last, but rather built to change. As an administrator of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g platform, you should expect more rapid and continuous changes by development teams in response to ever changing business requirements.

Being able to adapt to the changing business requirements is not only important once a system has gone live, but it is also equally important during development. This would mean expecting a greater number of builds, packaging, and deployments. The process of deployment involves piecing together multiple relevant components, compiling them, deploying the final package into a target environment, and finally running a series of tests to validate the build. This would have to be repeated in each environment until promoted to production. This process is manual, resource intensive, and highly error prone.

Note

Automating application deployments is a practice that is widely adopted within the software industry to alleviate manual, resource intensive, and highly error prone processes.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is unique in that it provides several ant scripts to assist in the compilation, build, and deployment of composites. These scripts can be executed manually, automated through custom scripts, or used from a continuous integration tool such as Hudson. As you read on, Chapter 2, Management of SOA Composite Applications of this book will cover details of how you can automate your composite build and deployment with ant scripts.

Think of a script which runs at regular time intervals or at the click of a button every time an administrator needs to deploy an application to the platform. By having automated build reports detailing the execution and/or issues of compilation and deployment, your time is freed up considerably to focus on other administrative activities. The following screenshot shows the continuous integration with the Oracle SOA Suite 11g platform:

The preceding screenshot shows the Hudson console for a build job and the output of an automated build, which is followed by an automated unit test. By leveraging continuous integration tools such as Hudson, the deployment and validation efforts required by the Oracle SOA Suite administrator are greatly reduced.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g enables administrators to further minimize manual steps involved when moving the domain infrastructure across physical machines. It allows what is referred to as green field movement, which entails leveraging existing out-of-the-box tools and capabilities to perform this activity without the reliance on external or third-party tools.

The following diagram depicts, at a high level, the process involved when moving Oracle Fusion Middleware components. This minimizes the amount of work that would otherwise be required to reapply all the customization and configuration changes made in one environment to another. You can install, configure, customize, and validate Oracle Fusion Middleware in a test environment. Once the system is stable and performs as desired, you can create the production environment by moving a copy of the components and their configurations from the test environment, instead of reimplementing all the changes that were incorporated into the test environment.

What is moved exactly?

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control is the Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrator's primary console to perform all necessary monitoring, management, and deployment activities. This includes administering areas such as the SOA infrastructure, composite applications, partitions, Java EE applications, and more. Through the console, you can perform the following functions:

Subsequent chapters delve into each of these areas in varying levels of detail.

Presenting the dashboards

Once you log in to Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, you are presented with the overall server state in a dashboard format. As shown in the following screenshot, deployment statuses are summarized in a pie chart, indicating a summary of the composites that are up, down, or in an unknown state. The state of deployed Java EE applications and infrastructure components are also shown. For example, out-of-the-box SOA Suite Java applications such as the BPM Composer (see BPMComposer in the following screenshot) are shown to have an up status. These Java applications, for example, are additional consoles and capabilities that are installed as part of Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

This dashboard is particularly useful to quickly and immediately get a snapshot of the overall health of the system.

On the navigation tree, when you expand SOA and click on soa-infra, you are presented with the SOA Infrastructure dashboard, which includes recent composite instances, deployed composites, and recent faults and rejected messages. By clicking on the various tabs, you are taken to a more detailed view.

For example, the Instances tab would show all instances, not just the recent ones. Clicking on the instance ID will pop up a new window, displaying the flow trace of that particular instance as shown in the following screenshot:

SOA suite configuration

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control allows you to configure areas of the SOA Infrastructure and service engines. This is done by expanding SOA in the navigator and right-clicking on soa-infra:

By expanding the SOA Administration menu as shown in the preceding screenshot, the various menu options will allow you to perform a number of configurations and setups on various SOA Infrastructure components and service engines that include the following.

• Common Properties: Here, you can modify server settings that impact the entire infrastructure. This includes global audit levels, capturing the state of composite instances, performing payload validation, configuring callback URLs, setting UDDI registry properties, setting retry counts, Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console optimization parameters, and more.

• BPEL Properties: This page provides the ability to set the maximum document size for a variable, enable or disable payload validation, disable sensors, configure BPEL Service Engine properties such as dispatcher system threads, invoke threads, engine threads, and more.

• BPMN Properties: This page provides the ability to set the audit trail size, set the maximum document size for a variable, enable or disable payload validation, configure dispatcher system threads, invoke threads, engine threads, and more.

• Mediator Properties: This page provides options for setting the audit level, DMS metrics level, number of parallel worker threads, number of maximum rows retrieved for parallel processing, parallel thread sleep values, error thread sleep values, and more.

• Workflow Notification Properties: Here, properties such as the workflow service notification mode and actionable e-mail address, and more, can be set for human workflow notifications.

• Workflow Task Service Properties: This page provides the ability to configure the actionable e-mail account, add the URL of the worklist application, select the pushback assignee, add portal realm mapping, and more.

• B2B Server Properties: Allows you to enable DMS metrics.

• Cross References: This page provides options for selecting cross-reference values.

In this chapter, we provided a snapshot of some of the important aspects of Oracle SOA Suite 11g administration and the capabilities that can be leveraged to effectively manage and monitor the SOA infrastructure.

To summarize this chapter's key takeaways:

Chapter 2, Management of SOA Composite Applications, dives deeper into the management aspects of Oracle SOA Suite 11g that were briefly touched upon here: