Routine monitoring

Most of the applications today are built with multi-tier architecture, where multiple middleware components are deployed in different tiers. Within each tier, there can be software components distributed on multiple servers. To monitor such applications, you need to monitor all of the components in the different tiers. For example, a typical web-based application serves content through HTTP server, has presentation tier deployed in J2EE container, has business tier deployed in the J2EE container, has authentication data stored in LDAP server, and has persistence in the relational database.

In such a distributed environment, often one or more components can become bottlenecks and can affect the performance of complete application. As a middleware administrator, you need to identify components that are bottlenecks, or can become potential bottlenecks, so that you can take some actions, such as adding more capacity for that component. For example, in a web-based application...