With customizable performance summaries one can analyze and correlate performance data more efficiently. This goal can be obtained by specifying time range from where to display data. You can select a time range to watch and analyze trends in your WebLogic Domain.

You can choose charts to be displayed, arrange order of charts, and display data from multiple components in single chart. For a performance trend analysis, you can use the option of saving a baseline of current performance data to be compared with future data possible.

Default Enterprise Manager has some out-of-the-box performance metrics for each Middleware target. Metrics which tell you the information about WebLogic domains, clusters, applications, Web Services, and many more. All the data about all these different components end up being stored in the database Management Repository.

Some examples that Enterprise Manager can automatically monitor are:

With Metric Extensions you can create metrics on any target type and customize these metric thresholds and collections. Metric Extensions can create metrics for a lot of target types.

The Composite Application dashboard gives full visibility into both service-level metrics as well as critical component-level metrics across any composite application. As composite applications consist of both Java EE and SOA components and perhaps other key middleware technologies such as Oracle Coherence and/or Oracle Service Bus, it is critical to provide a single dashboard view across the application with key indicators of the application health as well as some quick diagnostics to identify problems in an early stage.

Service tests can be set up to facilitate proactive monitoring of the composite application with service levels tracking the health of those service tests. JVM, WebLogic Server, Application Deployments, and Host metrics are available together with an incident console tracking all of the alerts or policy violations that might occur on those tiers.

Finally, the dashboard can be customized however you see fit to include any metrics and as many monitoring or diagnostics regions that are required, with specialized regions that can be added to the dashboard for many monitored target types.

Request Monitoring gives an end-to-end visibility into requests and helps localize end-user performance problems based on the application deployment model. In a way, you can visualize how servers interact with each other to deliver business end-user services requests. There is a possibility to trace end-user requests from the client to endpoint across all the servers and applications associated with each transaction.

Only synchronous transactions can be monitored that are running on WebLogic servers.

Some features of Request Monitoring are:

The following screenshot shows you the Request Monitoring summary page:

JVM Diagnostics in Enterprise Manager 12c can be used as a JVM diagnosis tool which has minimal impact on the JVM. You have real-time and historical monitoring and diagnostics always on. It occurs very often that Java applications often have availability and performance problems. A lot of time is spent diagnosing the root cause of these problems. Many times, the problems occurring in production environments either cannot be reproduced or may take too long to reproduce in other environments. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c's JVM Diagnostics enables administrators to diagnose performance problems in applications in a production environment. You do not have to reproduce problems, which improves application availability and performance.

Using JVM Diagnostics, administrators will detect in a quick way the root cause of performance problems without replaying them in the test or development environment. It does not require complex instrumentation or restarting of the application to get in-depth application details. It is even possible to drill down from Java problems to database issues that are causing application downtime without any detailed application knowledge.

You don't need any application instrumentation or any server restarts. It gives you a complete visibility into the JVM stack heap and threads. You can analyze the impact bi-directionally: JVM to a database or vice versa.

JVM Diagnostics can be deployed on any JVM (that is, Sun, JRockit, and IBM).

You can monitor a specific JVM in a pool, view historical and real-time data, and so on. You can do a lot of diagnosis by accessing the JVM home page and:

The following screenshot shows a typical JVM home page:

The Middleware Diagnostics Advisor analyzes the entire WebLogic stack and shows diagnostic findings and tries to get behind the root cause of a problem. It correlates and analyzes the input and offers advice on how to resolve the problem. For example, it can help you identify that slow SQL statements or a JDBC connection pool are causing a performance bottleneck.

You can view the diagnostic findings for one or more servers in a WebLogic Domain if the Middleware Diagnostics Advisor has been enabled.

You can create a diagnostic snapshot which provides a collection of both JVM and WebLogic Server diagnostics and log data that can be exported or imported into other Cloud Control systems for analysis at some other point in time.

The following screenshot shows SQL execution diagnostic finding with detailed analysis of slow SQL in your application with links to further analyze and tune the SQL:

When a WebLogic system reaches a critical state, the first thing is to solve the problem(s) that occur, but you probably would like to quickly capture diagnostics in a production environment in order to later analyze in the future.

This feature within Oracle Enterprise Manager gives you the ability to take a snapshot that will correlate both the JVM state (threads, garbage collection, RAM, CPU) and the overall WebLogic logs across one or more servers. They can also be exported to either another Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control or directly to Oracle support. This ensures that the diagnostics snapshot is later available for analysis in order to find the root cause and create a permanent fix to the problem.

The following screenshot is an example of the Diagnostics Snapshots Page of a JVM:

Enterprise Manager can integrate application instrumentation in the Enterprise Manager Event monitoring infrastructure. In an application, a developer can build some sort of JMX or Web Service operation, so for this you can build your own management plugin using command-line tools.

You can add performance metrics for JMX-instrumented applications deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server. To add, use a command-line tool emjmxcli to automate the generation of the target metadata and collection files. All JMX-enabled applications deployed to the WebLogic Server can be consolidated and monitored.

With emjmxcli you are able to monitor JMX Applications deployed on WebLogic Server. Monitoring JMX-instrumented applications with Enterprise Manager entails defining a new target type that Enterprise Manager can monitor via Management Plugins.

The JMX command-line tool (emjmxcli) simplifies creating the requisite target definition files — metadata and the default collection file.

The tool is an offline configuration utility that connects you to MBeanServer and enables you to browse available MBeans.

To start the JMX command-line tool:

Once invoked, the command-line interface automatically prompts you for the requisite information

Java EE metadata can be complex and abstract and this complexity keeps growing with the introduction of new frameworks. The difficulties lie between the various application components such as Servlets, JSPs, ADF, EJBs, and the corresponding code. A Middleware Administrator should understand the metadata defining those relationships.

With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, administrators can view dependencies and relationships between high-level components such as JSPs, Servlets, Portlets, and Web Services and the underlying Java EE components that support those services such as EJBs and JDBC calls.

The following screenshot shows invocation count for a servlet and its underlying components giving an idea of the flow of context for that URI. Also, administrators can check how much time is spent in each of the components via the delay analysis metrics provided in the associated pie chart and table. Administrators can then drill down deeper into each class or component to find out how it behaves based on the context from which it was originally called. This is particularly useful considering that many components in Java EE applications are considered shared components where context is critical.

With the Log Viewer, you can gain access to log files regardless of where they reside. You can access WebLogic and Fusion Middleware log files from a single console, search and correlate messages across log files based on time, severity, or Execution Context ID (ECID).

Also, it is possible to download log files or export messages to a text, XML, or CSV format.

If you like to control WebLogic Server Log Files, it is possible to use Oracle Management Service, a Java EE application deployed on an Oracle WebLogic Server.

You will find the log file information of the WebLogic Server components at:

<EM_INSTANCE_BASE>/user_projects/domains/<domain_name>/servers/<SERVER_NAME>/logs/<SERVER_NAME>.log

You can specify rotation by size or time, as well as the number of files to keep before it will be deleted. The default settings are:

With event monitoring, one can be proactive about availability and performance problems 24 x 7. You can specify critical versus warning thresholds for metrics.

There are various notification methods such as e-mail/page, SNMP trap, or OS command. Also, notification rules and schedules can be created for when to receive alerts.