Disabling an OSB proxy service essentially stops the OSB service from accepting an input. If the OSB proxy service is a web service, calls to the service will fail with an HTTP 404 error similar to the following:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.</p><p>If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

If the OSB proxy service is a polling service, then polling is suspended. The reverse is true when enabling a proxy service.

Manipulating the state of a proxy service is the equivalent of turning on or off the service. Similarly, State is applicable to business services.

The Monitoring operational setting enables or disables service monitoring. Certain operational settings, such as Logging and Alerts, rely on monitoring being enabled for them to function. Monitoring is disabled by default for all services.

The Aggregation Interval operational setting defines the aggregation interval for the service. Statistical data for the OSB component is collected and aggregated over the time period selected here. The default interval is 10 minutes.

During design time, the developer may have set up Service-level Agreement (SLA) Alerts. SLA Alerts can be viewed in Fusion Middleware Control under the Alert History tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.14: Viewing SLA alerts

The SLA Alerts operational setting simply enables or disables this function. SLA Alerting is enabled by default for all services.

Message Tracing is a feature in OSB that enables us to log pipeline actions in the server log at various levels. It allows administrators to troubleshoot and diagnose a message flow in one or more proxy services. Like other operational settings, Message Tracing can be enabled or disabled. During design time, a developer may choose to configure Message Tracing, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.15: Configuring Message Tracing through the Oracle Service Bus Console

This configuration is performed either through JDeveloper or the Service Bus Console. The enablement and disablement of Message Tracing is done through Fusion Middleware Control. Message Tracing is disabled by default.

The Pipeline Alerts operational setting allows the administrator to enable or disable alerting for pipelines at a specific severity level (or higher). Pipeline alerts are enabled at the normal level or higher by default.

The Logging operational setting enables or disables logging at a specific severity level for pipelines and split-joins. For example, when logging is enabled and the message tracing detail level is set to Full (as in Figure 4.15), full logging details can be observed in the osb_server1-diagnostic.log log file. This can include request and response payloads and everything in between, as shown in the following code:

[2015-02-01T09:34:16.598-05:00] [wls_osb1] [NOTIFICATION] [OSB-398200] [oracle.osb.resources.service.service] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '22' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: <anonymous>] [ecid: b136da4e-2d94-4b59-98d5-5291c201bb2b-000592c9,0] [APP: Service Bus Kernel] [FlowId: 0000Kh5^42J6ATMS6MGNsy1Kl6jH00000D] [[
 [OSB Tracing] Inbound request was received.

 Service Ref = HelloWorldOSB/HelloWorldPS
 URI = /HelloWorldOSB
 Message ID = 47b2cdd7.7e483a17.c.14b422bd014.N7fff
 Request metadata =
    <xml-fragment>
      <tran:headers xsi:type="http:HttpRequestHeaders" xmlns:http="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports/http" xmlns:tran="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
        <http:Accept-Encoding>gzip,deflate</http:Accept-Encoding>
        <http:Connection>Keep-Alive</http:Connection>
        <http:Content-Length>252</http:Content-Length>
        <http:Content-Type>text/xml;charset=UTF-8</http:Content-Type>
        <http:Host>osb.packt.com:8011</http:Host>
        <http:SOAPAction>""</http:SOAPAction>
        <http:User-Agent>Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)</http:User-Agent>
      </tran:headers>
      <tran:encoding xmlns:tran="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports">UTF-8</tran:encoding>
      <http:client-host xmlns:http="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports/http">static-71-178-205-210.washdc.fios.verizon.net</http:client-host>
      <http:client-address xmlns:http="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports/http">71.178.205.210</http:client-address>
      <http:http-method xmlns:http="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports/http">POST</http:http-method>
    </xml-fragment>
 Payload =
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:wss="http://raastech.com/">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <wss:hello>
         <arg0>Jack</arg0>
      </wss:hello>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

]]
[2015-02-01T09:34:16.663-05:00] [wls_osb1] [NOTIFICATION] [OSB-398201] [oracle.osb.resources.service.service] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '18' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: <anonymous>] [ecid: b136da4e-2d94-4b59-98d5-5291c201bb2b-000592c9,0:1] [APP: Service Bus Kernel] [FlowId: 0000Kh5^42J6ATMS6MGNsy1Kl6jH00000D] [[
 [OSB Tracing] Inbound response was sent.

 Service Ref = HelloWorldOSB/HelloWorldPS
 URI = /HelloWorldOSB
 Message ID = <47b2cdd7.7e483a17.c.14b422bd014.N7fff>
 Response metadata =
<xml-fragment>
  <tran:headers xsi:type="http:HttpResponseHeaders" xmlns:http="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports/http" xmlns:tran="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <http:Content-Type>text/xml; charset=utf-8</http:Content-Type>
  </tran:headers>
  <tran:response-code xmlns:tran="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports">0</tran:response-code>
  <tran:encoding xmlns:tran="http://www.bea.com/wli/sb/transports">utf-8</tran:encoding>
</xml-fragment>
 Payload =
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:wss="http://raastech.com/">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <wss:hello>
         <arg0>Hello Jack</arg0>
      </wss:hello>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

]]

Logging is extremely beneficial to troubleshoot issues. Generally speaking, enabling full logging is discouraged in a production environment that is running without any issues.

Report actions are valuable as they allow specific elements to be captured and displayed through the Oracle Service Bus Console. For example, you may have an order transaction that consists of hundreds of elements in the payload. But for the purposes of monitoring, you simply wish to capture the order number in order to identify its OSB instance. The following screenshot shows an example where we are capturing an order number from the input payload as a Report action:

Figure 4-16. Searching through captured Report actions

In Fusion Middleware Control, simply navigate to SOA | service-bus | Message Reports, where a list of all Report actions are displayed. In the preceding screenshot, we can also see numerous order numbers. In this example, administrators can search by a Report Index type to locate a specific order number. From there, clicking on Report Index unveils additional details surrounding this OSB instance.

The Report operational setting simply enables or disables message reporting for pipelines.

Therefore, Report actions may not be ideal for extremely high-volume transactions. The Report operational setting is enabled by default.

The Execution Tracing operational setting is also used to enable or disable execution tracing for pipelines and split-joins. Execution tracing is disabled by default, but when enabled, gives the administrator the ability to troubleshoot a message flow. Information, such as a stage name, pipeline or route node name, and the current message context, is captured.

Caching is only applicable for business services. The Caching operational setting simply enables or disables result caching for a business service at runtime. OSB uses coherence in the backend as its cache.

It is generally recommended that you use caching for data that is not frequently updated. For example, if you are an online retailer, the description of your product being sold rarely changes, and lookups to product descriptions may benefit from the 15% to 25% performance gain achieved by leveraging caching. The normal behavior of the caching feature is that it does not require re-invoking the backend until the data in the cache expires.