To log in to Fusion Middleware Control, simply navigate to the following URL in your web browser: http://<host>:<port>/em
The default port for HTTP is 7001 and the default port for HTTPS is 7002, though this depends on the settings used during installation. The default username is weblogic and the password is the one provided at installation or subsequently changed. All information related to the ports that the servers run on, the deployments that are targeted to them, along with their deployment orders and other resources configured on the servers are present in the config.xml file located under the $DOMAIN_HOME/config directory.
When you log in to Fusion Middleware Control, there are two targets that you will be working most frequently with: SOA Infrastructure and Service Bus.
By expanding SOA in the tree to the left, then clicking on soa-infra, you are presented with the soa-infra dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot. On the Dashboard tab, a consolidated view of various SOA Suite runtime metrics is displayed. It allows you to monitor runtime health, business transaction faults, and composite availability. The dashboard is not particularly useful by itself but provides the tabs Deployed Composites, Flow Instances, and Error Hospital, which you will use often. You can expand soa-infra to further drill down to the various partitions and composites.
Figure 2.9: The soa-infra dashboard
The OSB engine is a completely separate runtime engine from soa-infra. There is no dependency between the OSB and SOA infrastructures; thus, each component can be started up, monitored, and administered separately (though it is entirely possible that OSB services are dependent on SOA composite services and vice versa). Therefore, OSB has its own dashboard, as depicted in the following screenshot:
Figure 2.10: The service-bus dashboard
Runtime metrics are shown here with further options available in the Alert History, Service Health, Resequence Messages, Operations, and Global Settings tabs.
The dashboards are somewhat useful to quickly and immediately obtain a snapshot of the overall health of the system. Later in this chapter, we delve deeper into various navigation menus, while later chapters focus on the actual configuration and monitoring aspects.
The vertical navigation tree on the left, or the navigator, is your primary means of navigating to all other areas within the console. Here, you can right-click on many (but not all) menu items to pop up additional submenus. The navigator is the leftmost column, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 2.11: The navigator
Some of the menus are self-explanatory, while others, such as Metadata Repositories, are sparingly used. The various menu options are rather confusing for a new administrator, and in this section, we offer a different approach to explaining how to access the various options.
Expanding Application Deployments on the navigator lists all deployed Java EE applications, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 2.12: Deployed Java EE applications
These same applications can be managed in the WebLogic Server Administration Console as well. Some of the default applications installed with Oracle SOA Suite 12c include:
b2buiDefaultToDoTaskFlowsoa-infraservice_bussoa-webappsusermessagingdriver-*usermessagingserverworklistappESSAPPESSNativeHostingApp
On expanding Application Deployments | Internal Applications, a further list of applications is shown. The default internal applications installed with Oracle SOA Suite 12c include these:
DMS ApplicationemService Bus LWPF_ConsoleService Bus *wsil-wlswsm-pm
By clicking on any of these Java applications, you can view the source path of the EAR or JAR file, required data sources and modules, and so on.
It is fairly common to deploy additional custom Java applications, such as Java web services designed to supplement your SOA code, and target them to the SOA server (for example, soa_server1), although it is generally recommended to dedicate a separate managed server to them. Java applications can be deployed through WebLogic Server Administration Control or Fusion Middleware Control and through Ant scripts, for those interested in a command-line approach.
Expanding SOA exposes the service-bus infrastructure. Note how right-clicking on the OSB project name (for example, ValidatePayment) presents a reduced list of options—those that are only specific to the particular project—compared to right-clicking on service-bus. In the following screenshot, the menu on the left is specific to server-wide options:
Figure 2.13. Understanding the service-bus menus
When an OSB project is selected, the pane on the right displays the dashboard for that project. The dashboard provides a mechanism to search for existing Service Bus artifacts based on a number of search criteria such as service types, names, paths, and additional metadata. Clicking on Service Bus Project displays yet another menu exactly identical to the screenshot on the right of Figure 2.13. Direct links to each of the tabs shown are available (for example, Service Health, Operations, and so on) and access to the Message Reports, Import, and Export menus are provided. As you can see, Fusion Middleware Control provides numerous ways to navigate to the same destination. Later chapters discuss each of these options in more detail.
Figure 2.14: An OSB project dashboard
Expanding
SOA and right-clicking on soa-infra displays the following menu. Everything related to the management of Oracle SOA Suite 12c is done through here, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 2.15: The soa-infra context menu
Likewise, when you left-click on the SOA Infrastructure link at the top of the page, the same menu options appear (compare Figure 2.15 and Figure 2.16). The SOA Infrastructure link appears only when you have selected a SOA composite to work with. The following screenshot depicts the SOA Infrastructure drop-down menu:
Figure 2.16: The SOA Infrastructure drop-down menu
As with OSB projects, SOA composites have a SOA Composite drop-down list that is available when you have navigated to a SOA composite (see Figure 2.17). Here, direct links to the tabs shown on the screen are available (for example, Dashboard, Composite Definition, Flow Instances, Unit Tests, and Policies) and access to other menu items such as Find an Instance, SOA Deployment (Undeploy/Redeploy), Export, Test Service, and Service/Reference Properties are available. This is designed to make it easy for an administrator to quickly access specific functionality without having to navigate through multiple web pages. Observe the following screenshot:
Figure 2.17: A SOA composite dashboard
Expanding WebLogic Domain on the navigator and right-clicking on the name of your domain shows the context menu displayed in Figure 2.18. Here, key WebLogic Server administration functions are immediately and easily accessible. This includes setups such as data sources, JMS servers and resources, and managed servers. The majority of the functionality here can also be accessed via the WebLogic Server Administration Console, but not all of it. Functions related to Web Services Manager policies, component wiring, and SOA deployments can only be done from this console.
Clicking on WebLogic Domain in the top-left corner of the navigator displays the same menu shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 2.18: The WebLogic Domain menu
Expanding Metadata Repositories, also referred to as MDS, may display any number of MDS repositories such as mds-mft, mds-owsm, and mds-soa, depending on your installation. This gives the administrator the ability to register and deregister a file-based or database-based MDS repository, configure an application to use a different metadata repository, move from a file-based to a database-based repository, move metadata from a test system to a production system, and manage labels in the MDS repository.
Expanding User Messaging Service, or UMS, provides access to various drivers such as e-mail, SMS, Twitter, Google Voice, and more. The administrator can configure, monitor, and manage the various aspects of UMS from here. Chapter 7, Configuration and Administration, describes the configuration and setup of UMS in more detail.