Oracle SOA Suite 11g Performance Tuning Cookbook: Featuring over 100 recipes, this handy cookbook will walk you through the different ways to optimize the performance of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Essential reading for administrators, developers, and architects.

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...

Hyperic is a monitoring tool that can be used to collect, store, display, and alert on metrics from Oracle SOA Suite 11g. It has the server and agent components, and in this recipe, we will look at installing the server.

Hyperic agents need to be installed on each machine that you wish to monitor. The agent will report the metrics back to the Hyperic server. In this recipe, we will learn how to install a Hyperic agent.

Once the Hyperic server and agents have been installed, there are a few more steps that are needed to get the Hyperic server to monitor the WebLogic server instances that run your Oracle SOA Suite 11g application.

One of the most obvious things to have Hyperic HQ monitor for you is whether your servers are available; that is, whether they are running and responding to requests. In this recipe, we will learn how to view the availability information for our SOA Suite 11g instances.

Many of the common causes of performance problems have their roots in memory management, so monitoring the memory usage of the servers in your SOA Suite domain can alert you to many performance problems before they become problematic. In this recipe, we will see how we can view graphs of the current and historical memory usage of our SOA Suite 11g application.

In this recipe, we are going to learn how to view the CPU usage of the platforms running SOA Suite 11g. CPU usage is one of the key areas where bottlenecks can occur, and knowing that our CPU is running at 100 percent allows us to focus our efforts into working out what is using the CPU.

Oracle SOA Suite applications make a very heavy use of database connections, so if the connection pools get exhausted, then performance can suffer dramatically. By monitoring the data source usage, you can ensure that the number of available connections is sufficient.

Sockets and file handles are resources that are limited by the operating system, and can get exhausted in busy SOA Suite applications. This recipe shows us how to monitor the open sockets.

The number of committed transactions on a server gives a good indication of how busy it is, so this can be a good indicator of the user load on a system. This recipe will show us how to view the Hyperic charts and metrics related to the Java Transaction API subsystem.

Monitoring an application provides information on how that application is behaving, and it can be compared to the old data to understand when an application is behaving abnormally, but if all we have is graphical monitoring, we need someone to sit and watch the metrics looking for abnormal behavior. Alerting allows us to have the monitoring framework notify us when a metric breaches some boundary condition, meaning we can receive an e-mail or other notification when something needs looking at, and don't have to sit looking at the metrics.

The DMS Spy servlet provides access to information from the Oracle Dynamic Monitoring System. It is not strictly a monitoring tool, as it does not display historical metrics or trends, but has a wide range of metrics, so is nevertheless useful.