Introduction

In this chapter, we will look at the importance of monitoring your Oracle SOA Suite application. The topics covered include how to configure monitoring, what to monitor, and how to interpret the data that your monitoring tool returns.

Performance monitoring is the key to any successful tuning strategy. In order to improve the performance, you need to be able to measure before and after any changes you make. This can, of course, be done with simple performance testing tools, but these only give you the top-level results. What we want to do is dig deeper down and work out where time is being spent, and which monitoring tools allow us to do.

The term monitoring covers a wide range of tools and techniques, from simple systems that just tell us if a process is running or not, through complex user-experience monitoring tools that break down each user request into component parts, and can show what time and resources were involved in generating the response. The most value is obtained...