This document discusses best practices for monitoring an enterprise service bus (ESB). It recommends monitoring all components that make up the ESB, including front end systems, business logic layers, messaging systems, databases and operating systems. It presents IBM Tivoli as a monitoring tool that can provide a consolidated view and centralized monitoring of all ESB components. The document provides examples of dashboards and reports that Tivoli can generate to provide visibility into the flow of services through an ESB and status of individual components. It also discusses how Tivoli can integrate with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to monitor service level policies defined in WSRR.

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IT: Customized to Your Advantage
Monitoring an Enterprise Service Bus
Monitoring Best Practices
SURESH WILSON
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Agenda
 How to monitor an ESB?
 Which components to monitor?
 How to provide better visibility?
 Better notification and problem determination
 Agent best practices
 Reporting
 WSRR Integration for policy monitoring
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A Typical ESB
DB2 Database
Legacy Systems
DataPower
DataPower
MQ
MQ
IIB (WMB)
IIB (WMB)
WS Providers
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How to monitor an ESB?
Use Monitoring tools
Preferably a single tool that can monitor all the ESB
components
consolidated view
centralized monitoring and alerts
common reporting
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Typical ESB Monitoring needs
Development cycle
•Understand application behaviour
•Diagnose and fix problems
•Replay production failures and help fix problems
Test cycle
•Understand and isolate connectivity issues and source
of problems
•Diagnose and fix problems
Performance cycle
•Measure and report performance behaviour
•Assist in infrastructure sizing
•Optimize application and system performance
Production cycle
•Help ensure continuous availability and measure
performance
•Real time monitoring and automate response actions
•Report usage statistics and help in capacity planning
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Typical Challenges with ESB Monitoring
 Multiple components
 Too many data points
 Correlating data
 Tracking the service flow
 Provide meaningful views
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Non-technical challenges
 Monitoring teams and applications teams typically do not work
together
 Applications teams do not know the capabilities of the monitoring
tools and the monitoring teams do not know what the application
teams need
• Identify key members and have them work together to put together the
best possible solution
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Which components to monitor?
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Which components to monitor?
 Monitor everything that makes up the enterprise bus
• Front end (Web servers, appliances etc.)
• Business logic layer (IIB, BPM etc.)
• Messaging layer (MQ etc.)
• Databases
• Operating systems
• Legacy sources
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Why?
 Any participating product or component can contribute to the
reliability (or lack thereof) of the ESB
 Monitoring each component is essential to proactive availability and
health monitoring
 Don’t let unknowns cause surprises
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The Tivoli (C&SI) Way
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Tivoli - For all the monitoring needs
Development cycle
•Understand application behaviour
•Diagnose and fix problems
•Replay production failures and help fix problems
Test cycle
•Understand and isolate connectivity issues and source
of problems
•Diagnose and fix problems
Performance cycle
•Measure and report performance behaviour
•Assist in capacity planning and environment sizing
•Optimize application and system performance
Production cycle
•Help ensure continuous availability and measure
performance
•Real time monitoring and automate response actions
•Report usage statistics and help in capacity planning
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Why Tivoli/ITCAM?
 Agents and capabilities to monitor (almost) every market leading
product
 Integration between the various products (WSRR, TBSM, JazzSM,
Omnibus etc.)
 Unified, customizable and extensible interface
 Built on the solid Tivoli Monitoring Foundation
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Why Tivoli/ITCAM - continued
 Monitoring, automation and reporting capabilities for
 service performance
 application servers
 messaging infrastructure
 virtual environments
 operating systems
 so on and on
 Use these to quickly identify and isolate problem areas
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Example – SOA Aggregate views
See how the service requests flow through the various components
• Helps to easily identify bottlenecks, problem areas
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How to provide better visibility?
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How to provide better visibility?
 Understand the environment from an application and services
perspective
 Identify the critical areas (Queues, Channels, DataPower objects,
Message flows, Applications, CPU, Disk I/O etc.)
 Build custom dashboards to display the various components that
participate in a service
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Work with the consumers
 Consumers (developers/ administrators/ business users etc.)
 Understand what they want to see
 Understand how they want to see it
 Increase the return on investment by leveraging the data provided by
the agents
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Create user-friendly easy to use dashboards
From the default views to…
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Example Dashboard – Custom views
…easy to understand
dashboards
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Create consolidated dashboards
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Example Dashboard – OS Level
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Example Dashboard – MQ Status
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Example – DataPower Status from multiple appliances
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Example – Service Provider Status Dashboard
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Example– Dashboard For Operations Team
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Notifications
 Use the out-of-the-box situations when it makes sense
 Start with the numbers seen during performance testing
 Fine tune the situations on a regular basis
 Too many alerts is as good as no alerts
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Agent Best Practices
 Know the agent behavior in your environment (product version
support, performance behavior etc.)
• Not just OOTB, but also for environment specific requirements
 Start with the development environment – no after thought – be
proactive
 Routinely implement updated configuration as the solution matures
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Agent Performance
 Agents do have overhead; understand the numbers
 Plan for the overhead during infrastructure sizing
 Performance Testing – not just for the application, also for the agents
and the Tivoli infrastructure
(agent level, TEMS-TEPS level, DWH level)
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Reporting
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Reporting
 Use Tivoli Common Reporting
• Easy to understand graphical reports
• Use for usage statistics, trend analysis etc.
 Build custom reports for environment specific reporting requirements
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Sample List of Reports
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Sample OS Report
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ITCAM for SOA - WSRR Integration
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ITCAM for SOA – WSRR Integration
 Author the service policies in WSRR
 Enforce the policies in the Runtime (DataPower/IIB/BPM)
 Monitor the policies using Tivoli
 Automatic propagation of policies from WSRR to Tivoli
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Create a WSRR policy
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Provide the policy details
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Provide the policy details
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Attach the policy to the SLD
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Tivoli monitors the new policy
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Meeting the monitoring goals
Know about the end user experience
Help understand root causes
Measure performance behaviour
Report on usage and assist in capacity planning
Help tune and optimize performance
Trigger proactive notification alerts
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Thank You
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