Identifying slow-running components with the Enterprise Manager

We can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control to view the slow-performing components of our SOA Suite middleware infrastructure, allowing us to target our performance improvements at those components.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes that you have Oracle SOA Suite installed and running, and are able to generate sufficient load against it to demonstrate any performance problems.

You must have the Oracle Enterprise Manager component installed in your domain, and you will need to know the administration username and password for the domain.

How to do it…

1. Connect to Oracle Enterprise Manager running on the admin server on the URL http://<hostname>:<port>/em; by default, this will be http://localhost:7001/em if you are connecting from the same host.

2. Log in to Oracle Enterprise Manager by using your administration credentials.

3. Open Application Deployments, right-click on soa_infra, and select Performance Summary.

4. Check that request processing time is not high.

How it works…

Oracle Enterprise Manager is an Oracle product that is used to manage and monitor components of the SOA Suite infrastructure. Some of its features are licensed separately to Oracle SOA Suite. So, if you are unsure, you should check with your Oracle account manager to check whether you are licensed or not to use it.

Oracle Enterprise Manager can be used to manage many components within Oracle SOA Suite, and here we use it to view the performance summary for the SOA infrastructure components. In this instance, we view the request processing time, which tells us how long each request is taking to be processed. It is averaged across a large number of components, so you are really looking to see that it is not higher than usual. This of course requires you to know what usual is, so like all of these statistics, it is worth understanding how the system behaves when there are no performance problems.

There's more…

If you get a 404 error when attempting to connect to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console, it is likely that you did not add it to your game when you created your domain. You can add it to your domain subsequently by running the configuration manager, selecting your current domain, and extending it to add Oracle Enterprise Manager, although you should be aware that this may overwrite any configuration changes that you have made to the startup scripts.