Every organization faces the need to predict changes in the global business environment, rapidly respond to competitors, and tries its best to utilize its assets to prepare for the growth and changes in the IT landscape. Your enterprise application infrastructure can either help you meet these business imperatives or it can impede your ability to adapt to change.
To proactively respond to these challenges and the dynamics of change, major organizations worldwide are adopting Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) as a means to deliver on these requirements. They are also trying to improve their business-IT alignment by adopting Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies, which cannot be successfully realized without a complementing service-oriented architecture infrastructure. The adoption of SOA and BPM methodologies is helping organizations overcome the complexity of their application and IT environments while narrowing the gap between IT and the business. An SOA represents a fundamental shift in the way new applications are designed, developed, and integrated with legacy business applications, and it facilitates the development of enterprise applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused.
Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a comprehensive suite of products that not only includes the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process manager, human workflow, Mediator, Service Bus, and Web Services Manager, but also components such as business activity monitoring, Business-to-Business (B2B), User Messaging Service, Enterprise Scheduler, and event processing—all designed to help us build, deploy, and manage applications based on enterprise grade SOA. The deployment of the Oracle SOA Suite 12c platform within the enterprise is accelerated by the continued alignment of business and IT as a result of the rapid adoption of service-oriented and event-driven architectures and business process management.
While businesses strive to be more agile and dynamic, their dependency on a reliable, robust, and scalable infrastructure is also increasing. The need for proactive administration, management, and monitoring of the underlying SOA infrastructure is essential for business continuity. As a SOA administrator, here are some important considerations that you should look at to provide a stable and dependable environment:
- An essential aspect of any successful SOA deployment is the ability to continuously monitor mission-critical services, business processes, events, and service levels in real time to immediately identify problems and take necessary corrective actions.
- Proper management of Service-level Agreements (SLA) is required to define, track, and control appropriate service levels. They provide us with a necessary alert mechanism in the event of an SLA violation.
- SOA infrastructure monitoring provides us visibility of the performance of each individual service transaction across distributed and heterogeneous systems. With this end-to-end visibility, problems can be spotted quickly and corrected to ensure reliable operations.
- The SOA infrastructure is also expected to enforce policies for runtime governance, security, and audit compliance.
- The ability to easily and efficiently automate deployments is equally important as it enables the administrator to rapidly respond to continuous code changes.
In this chapter, we will provide you with an overview of how to monitor and manage Oracle SOA Suite 12c, which ultimately serves as a prelude for the remainder of this book. This book describes each of these areas and more, in varying degrees of detail, to arm you with the necessary background and understanding as well as detailed instructions on how to perform key administrative tasks within the Oracle SOA Suite 12c product stack. This chapter introduces the following topics:
- Overcoming monitoring and management challenges in a SOA
- Centralized monitoring and management of the SOA platform
- Performance monitoring and management
- Managing composite application lifecycles
- Overview of the Oracle Fusion Middleware landscape
- The Oracle SOA Suite 12c infrastructure stack
- The new features of Oracle SOA Suite 12c
This book focuses on core Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus, as well as Oracle WebLogic Server, but not on Oracle BPM Suite, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and Oracle B2B, all of which warrant books of their own.
The very nature of an SOA involves the implementation of services that are distributed and loosely coupled, and thus monitoring these services is complex due to the involvement of disparate systems that may include external systems and external resources (for example, messaging queues, databases, and so on). Tracing transactions across a loosely coupled implementation, particularly if it involves invocations to external applications, is extremely complicated.
The reusable nature of a SOA increases the importance of managing availability and performance of these services and greatly increases the need for a closed loop governance. In order to achieve the desired quality of service (QoS), each service endpoint must literally be managed like a resource. Managed services should have near zero downtime, measurable performance metrics, and a defined service-level agreement. In a composite service infrastructure, it is required that you monitor and manage the end-to-end view of the systems as well as provide detailed information about performance and availability metrics of individual services. Each part of the overall SOA system can appear healthy while individual service transactions can appear like they are suffering.
Another important aspect of SOA monitoring is auditing and logging. The distributed nature of SOA makes a standardized auditing/logging approach difficult to implement. In addition to monitoring services in real time, an administrator is also required to perform standard administrative duties such as health checks, taking backups, deploying code, tuning performance, purging old instance data, and more. In general, SOA infrastructure administrators are swamped with the following tasks and activities:
- Performing health checks of servers and infrastructure
- Managing multitier transaction flows some of which are as follows:
- Spanning shared components/services
- Deploying multitier transactions across several tiers in different containers
- Managing multitier transactions across the enterprise
- Obtaining performance metrics and visibility of SOA services:
- Obtaining performance metrics beyond generic Java classes and methods
- Obtaining framework and metadata visibility
- Obtaining specific knowledge of the Oracle platform
- Maintaining control over configuration changes
- Tuning the performance of a service infrastructure
- Performing time-consuming administrative tasks, which include:
- Setting up, provisioning, and patching environments
- Code deployments
- Cloning and scaling up
- Backups and restores
- Purging and cleanup
- Troubleshooting faults and exceptions
- Policy and security administration
This book intends to provide a thorough understanding of how to perform each of these tasks and activities as an Oracle SOA Suite 12c administrator.