The document discusses best practices for managing and monitoring WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) as a critical solution for integrating business operations, highlighting challenges such as transaction accountability, organizational risks, and inadequate monitoring. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining lean message flows, managing interdependencies, and employing proper monitoring solutions to address potential issues and ensure successful transaction management. The Correlsense SharePath is introduced as a solution for comprehensive monitoring of WMB-based applications.

1. Best Practices for Managing and
Monitoring WebSphere Message
Broker
June 25, 2013
Amir Gabrieli,
Vice President of Solution Engineering,
Correlsense

2. 1. WMB’s role today
2. Challenges to managing WMB
3. Best practices
4. Correlsense approach
5. Summary and Q&A
Agenda

3. Housekeeping
• Presentation will last 45 minutes
• Submit questions via the chat window
• Slides will be made available tomorrow

4. Featured Speaker
Amir Gabrieli
VP, Solution Engineering
Correlsense

5. WMB’S ROLE IN TODAY’S
COMPLEX SOLUTIONS

6. Market Example: Rede D’Or São Luiz
• Largest private hospital network in Brazil with 27
hospitals and 25,000 employees
• Needed to integrate multiple systems and ensure
easy access to information
• Uses WMB to:
– Automate communication between operational units
– Exchange information between hospitals and with
backend operations
– Handle a high volume of information
Case study from IBM: http://www-
01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/KPES-
97JPWS?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us

7. CHALLENGES AROUND
MANAGING WMB-BASED
SOLUTIONS

8. Managing WMB in Production
is Challenging
• WMB comes with inherent challenges
– Acts as a hub for business critical transactions
– Mediates between services and protocols
• Risks include:
– Losing critical business transactions
– Failing critical business transactions
– General outages
– Poor performance of Flows
and transactions

9. The Challenges
• Organizational
• Change Management
• Transactions Accountability
• Production Monitoring

10. Organizational Challenge
• Different owners … one business service
• Often the WMB developer sits in a different
department from the application owner
• Message Flow “code” is not always under the
application owner’s control

11. Organizational Risks/Challenge
• Message Flow code is prone to logical errors
• May result in unexpected/unsupported
transaction flows
• Message Flows are more complicated than
assumed
• Not enough QA/ testing invested for new
Message Flows

12. Change Management Challenge
• Making and deploying changes in Message Flows
is easy … too easy
– Dependencies with event sources, event consumers and
other services are not always obvious
– Hard to determine which components will be affected by
a change

13. Change Management Risks/Challenge
• Small/last-minute changes may cause flow
incompatibilities
• Often the test cycles for Message Flows are not
well defined

14. Transactions Accountability
• Making sure each transaction is successful and
having the ability to explain why other
transactions fail
• Risks/challenges:
– Typically you won’t be alerted to lost transactions and
Message Flows
– These may result in lost revenue and complications with
business partners

15. Monitoring Challenge
• Existing monitoring solutions provide limited
coverage
• WMB’s internal monitoring and standard solutions
do not effectively address these challenges
– Most focus on WMB and MQ performance
– Do not directly monitor the run-time execution of flows
– Or the interdependencies in the environment

16. Monitoring Risks/Challenge
• Long and complex troubleshooting sessions
• Less control over the environment and solution

17. BEST PRACTICES APPROACH TO
MANAGING AND MONITORING
WMB-BASED APPLICATIONS

18. 1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking
• Production issues are unavoidable
– Provide and use better tracking and logging functionality
• Why?
– Easier to track and
troubleshoot in
production
– Provides a clear
understanding

19. 1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking
AddToInventory
AddToInventory_SOAPInput
InventoryServices
FindInventory_SetFunctionName
Reply_To_Queue
SetMQProperties
SetExpressionToLocalEnvironment
GetInventoryAvailabilityToFindInventoryInput_Transformation
Trace_GetInventoryAvailabilityToFindInventoryInput
SetMQProperties
JMS MQ Transform
SetSOAPReplyIdToJMSCorrelID
JMS Output
Example:
• Log when Message Flow start/end/failed
• Log when Message Nodes start/end/fail

20. 1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking
Example:
• Log which
messages were
received/sent
• Log which
queues are
involved

21. 1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking
Example:
• Capture errors

22. 2. Keep Message Flows Lean
• Experienced WMB users tend to keep their
Message Flows lean
• Why?
– Message Flow syntax can get complicated and hard to
maintain
– Keeping simple Message Flows makes WMB easier to
maintain and reuse

23. 3. Keep Logic in the Apps
• Complex logic associated with Message Flows
should be pushed to the application components
• Avoid developing complex logic within the flow
• Why?
– Keep your Message Flows lean
– Keep your applications decoupled
– Complex validation tests and logic are easier to develop
in programming languages

24. 4. Manage the Inter-Dependencies
• Track and manage interdependency mapping
between WMB, Message Flow, services and
applications
• Why?
– Understand who is impacted by changes
– Understand who is impacted by problems
– Increase control over the solution

25. 4. Manage the Inter-Dependencies
Example:
• Interdependency between applications, Web-Services, and other
services using WMB

26. 5. No Code Changes in Production
• Changes should never be executed directly on the
production environment
• They should be made on a test environment and
then moved to production after approval
• Why?
– Ensure all changes in production are controlled and
verified by QA

27. 6. Manage Transaction Accountability
• Errors and unexpected flow behaviors will result
in lost messages
– For business critical solutions, this could cause lost
revenue or complications with partners
• Each transaction should be tracked and audited
through the entire IT stack and WMB flows
• Why?
– Audit for historical review
– Ensure the application owner can quickly find and handle
lost messages and errors

28. 6. Manage Transaction Accountability

29. 6. Manage Transaction Accountability

30. 7. Have Proper Monitoring Solutions
• You need to monitor:
– WMB
– MQ
– Message Flows
– Business Transactions
• Why?
– WMB-based solutions have many weak spots
– Ensure smooth operation and fast reaction to issues

31. CORRELSENSE APPROACH

32. SharePath for WMB
• Correlsense SharePath is an enterprise scale
transaction centric application management and
monitoring solution
• SharePath uses a unique monitoring technology
for comprehensive monitoring of WMB-based
applications

33. SharePath WMB Agent
• Complete visibility into WMB Message Flow
processing
OS
Core Collector
Execution Group
Process
(DataFlowEngine)
WMB Flows/Nodes
WMB Collector
MQ Client
MQ Collector

34. EXAMPLES

35. Real Time Tracing and Monitoring of
Message Flows

36. Deep Dive for WMB Flows
• Log which SQLs and other API calls were called by nodes

37. Find (Lost) Transactions and
Message Flows

38. Transaction Auto-Detection,
Dependency and Topology Mapping

39. Load and Volume Trending
By Message Flow By Execution Group /
Process
By Node
(Message Flow Step)

40. Summary
• WMB is a market leader
service bus solution
• Like other service buses it has
inherent monitoring challenges
• Best practices and appropriate
monitoring solutions are critical

41. Questions?
More information:
info@correlsense.com
www.correlsense.com