Monitoring in Oracle SOA Suite 12c enables a closed loop governance by connecting design time to runtime. Once the services, their metadata, and the associated policies are deployed, they are automatically monitored and managed by the service infrastructure that regularly updates the management console with a scorecard of the runtime metrics that are collected.

Oracle SOA Suite 12c runs on top of numerous infrastructure components that include a variety of operating systems, database management systems, and Java EE compliant application servers. All Oracle SOA Suite 12c components have specific functions that are used to administer and manage parts of a 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:

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 period of time. In order to maximize performance, you will need to monitor, analyze, and tune all the components that make up your application and infrastructure.

The performance of your SOA composites can be directly impacted by the design and implementation of the application code itself, the settings and configuration of the service infrastructure, or the performance of external resources such as queuing or storage systems. Now, the question is, where do you begin to identify a performance bottleneck?

Fortunately, Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control is a single console that captures and displays key information such as WebLogic Server performance statistics as well as transaction performance details. The following screenshot is simply an overall server-level performance summary:

Figure 1.1: Viewing performance snapshots using Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control

(Later chapters delve into the performance monitoring and tuning aspects of individual components in more detail.)

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 are no one-size-fits-all solutions that work well in every environment. Improving performance is a process of learning and testing. 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 one.

A typical software development lifecycle is comprised of multiple phases such as requirement gathering, analysis, design, development, testing, and promotion. Within the Oracle SOA development lifecycle, deployment and runtime management tend to introduce certain complexities. The following screenshot shows a simple HelloWorld SOA composite application in Oracle JDeveloper 12c that is implemented using a BPEL component:

Figure 1.2: Developing a HelloWorld SOA application using BPEL in Oracle JDeveloper

As a 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 when the composite is promoted to higher environments such as test and production.

For example, your developers may have designed a SOA composite that processes payments by calling PayPal's API service. Naturally, they would be referencing PayPal's sandbox server (For example, https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/2.0) during development. What happens when this same SOA composite is deployed to production? How are these references automatically updated to utilize PayPal's production servers? How about timeout settings and other properties that differ from environment to environment?

Oracle SOA Suite 12c offers comprehensive lifecycle management features starting from development all through packaging, deployment, and post-deployment management:

Figure 1.3 illustrates how a developer IDE such as JDeveloper (top-left corner) is used to build and compile SOA composites that can eventually be packed and deployed as SAR files to the Oracle SOA Suite 12c infrastructure for execution. The composites along with their instances can be instantaneously managed and monitored from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control (bottom-left corner).

Figure 1.3: A typical Oracle SOA Suite 12c application lifecycle

Before examining Oracle SOA Suite 12c in more detail, it is important to understand where it lies within the application architecture framework.

Within the Oracle technology stack, Fusion Middleware lies between applications and backend infrastructures such as a database, an operating system, and hardware (refer to Figure 1.4). Applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications rely on numerous middleware components to serve several functions. The areas that Oracle Fusion Middleware is meant to address could include reporting. There may be single sign-on requirements. There could likely also be integration with other external applications.

Figure 1.4: Location of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack within the environment architecture

Unfortunately, many technologists, including Oracle itself, sometimes refer to Oracle Fusion Middleware as a product when in fact it is a collection of software products of which Oracle SOA Suite is a part of. Just to reiterate, despite various press releases or blog post allusions, there is no product called Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Oracle Fusion Middleware encompasses products that service areas of business intelligence, identity management, content management, integration, and more. Products such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), Oracle Access Manager (OAM), Oracle WebCenter Content, and Oracle SOA Suite are all designed to satisfy these various middleware needs, and all of these run on the core application server, Oracle WebLogic Server.

Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a middleware component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c and provides a set of infrastructure services to support SOA composite applications and Oracle Service Bus (OSB) services. Though this single product can satisfy the overwhelming majority of an organization's SOA needs, it is not the only integration product within the Oracle Fusion Middleware integration stack. Products such as Oracle API Manager, Oracle API Catalog, and Oracle API Gateway (OAG) cover the governance needs of SOA applications. Oracle SOA Core Extension (formerly known as the Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack), an extension to Oracle SOA Suite, provides a framework that is intended to reduce development efforts through the inclusion of templates and methodologies. Tools such as Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle GoldenGate are designed for bulk data transfers. And new tools to Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c are Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Oracle Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS), which are designed to support file transfers and scheduling. The following figure shows Oracle SOA Suite 12c at the center of the Oracle Fusion Middleware integration product stack:

Figure 1.5: Oracle SOA Suite 12c at the crux of the Oracle Fusion Middleware integration product stack

Oracle SOA Suite 12c is the product of choice for most integration infrastructures, and as shown in Figure 1.5, it is the heart of the Oracle Fusion Middleware integration suite of products. It includes numerous subcomponents that include BPEL, Mediator, Service Bus, Business Activity Monitoring, B2B, Web Services Manager, and more. It is not uncommon for Oracle SOA Suite to be deployed and used in conjunction with some of the other integration products described earlier and depicted in Figure 1.5.

As mentioned earlier, Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. Oracle has put in the efforts to make this stack robust, extensible, and agile, in part by including some of the best technologies available in the market. Instead of cobbling together enterprise solutions from disparate vendors and products, Oracle SOA Suite 12c 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. These components include:

Other binding components and services that would require the knowledge and attention of the administrator include:

SOA composite applications can consist of a variety of components, binding components, references, and services, all of which can be administered from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. A screenshot of Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c is shown here:

Figure 1.6: A screenshot of Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c

(This will be discussed in much detail in Chapter 2, Navigating Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c.)

What differentiates Oracle SOA Suite 12c from other comparable products on the market is the consolidation of the stack into a unified service platform that translates to major user benefits. A Service Component Architecture (SCA), a maturing Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is the key enabler here. SCA enables you to manage versions and deploy components and metadata as a single unit. All artifacts are stored in a single repository, the Oracle Metadata Services (MDS). But, the story doesn't stop here; Oracle SOA Suite 12c also consolidates the runtime into a modular architecture of engines plugging into a common service infrastructure. And the engine consolidation naturally leads to a simplified monitoring infrastructure, still maintaining a vendor-neutral Java EE platform! All of this translates into numerous design time, runtime, and monitoring benefits, many of which we will explore throughout this book.

What are the benefits of upgrading from Oracle SOA Suite 11g to 12c? There are numerous, but from an administration standpoint, some of the desirable features introduced with 12c include:

In this chapter, we provided a snapshot of some of the important aspects of Oracle SOA Suite 12c administration and the capabilities that can be leveraged to effectively manage and monitor the SOA infrastructure.

To summarize this chapter's key takeaways: