(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Customizing the Administration Console tables

The Administration Console is the central tool for managing, configuring, and monitoring WebLogic.

This recipe shows how to customize the Administration Console tables to display more columns and more information and data that are hidden by default. This is a simple but essential feature to help monitor the WebLogic Server.

Getting ready

Access the Administration Console. The following procedure customizes the threads’ monitoring table of the Managed Server Self-Tuning’s thread pool.

How to do it…

Carry out the following steps to customize the Administration Console tables:

1. Access the Administration Console with your web browser at http://adminhost.domain.local:7001/console.

2. Click on the plus sign to open the Environment tree on the left and then click on the Servers link.

3. Click on any server, such as the PROD_Server01 link. Click on the Monitoring tab and then on the Threads tab to open the Threads page.

   

4. Click on the second Customize this table link of the Self-Tuning Thread Pool Threads table.

   

5. Click on the >> button to add the columns Application, Module, and Work Manager. Change the Number of rows displayed per page value to 1000. Click on the Apply button.

   

How it works…

The Administration Console allows the user to customize and add more columns to the monitoring tables. In this recipe, the Application, Module, and Work Manager columns are added to the Self-Tuning Thread Pool Threads table.

The added columns are very useful to monitor the application requests being processed. The following table displays thread 0 processing a request of the testWeb application and thread 1 processing a request of the myApp application.

Customizing the Administration Console monitoring tables is a common task and can be applied in a variety of tables, such as the data sources, the JMS queues, and transactions.

Using the JRockit Mission Control Management Console

Mission Control is a monitoring and troubleshooting application provided with Oracle JRockit.

From a monitoring point of view, Mission Control provides a Management Console to monitor the garbage-collection behavior, processor utilization by the JVM, memory allocation, thread utilization, and some other useful monitoring metrics.

Mission Control is a standalone application, so it must be started either locally from the same machine that WebLogic is running on or from a remote workstation.

If you run Mission Control locally on the Linux server prod01, an X window must be available.

This recipe will run Mission Control in a Microsoft Windows desktop and will remotely connect and monitor the PROD_Server01 Managed Server.

Getting ready

Oracle JRockit must be downloaded and installed in the Windows desktop. Download Oracle JRockit 6 for Microsoft Windows at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/ middleware/jrockit/downloads. The filename is jrockit-jdk1.6.0_XXX-windowsiaYY. exe, where XXX stands for the JRockit release and JDK version and YY stands for 32 bits or 64 bits. Choose the version that matches your desktop and accept the license agreement to download it.

How to do it…

Enable the PROD_Server01 Managed Server to accept JMX connections from Mission Control:

1. Access the Administration Console with your web browser at http://adminhost.domain.local:7001/console.

2. Click on the Lock & Edit button to start a new edit session.

3. Click on the plus sign to open the Environment tree on the left and then click Servers.

4. Click on the PROD_Server01 link and then click the Server Start tab.

   

5. Add the following to the Arguments field and click on the Save button:

   -Xmanagement:autodiscovery=false,authenticate=false,ssl=fa
   lse,interface=prodsrv01.domain.local,port=8081 -Djava.rmi.
   server.hostname=prodsrv01.domain.local -Djavax.management.
   builder.initial=weblogic.management.jmx.mbeanserver.
   WLSMBeanServerBuilder

6. Click on the Activate Changes button.

7. Restart PROD_Server01.

Start Mission Control on the desktop, as follows:

1. Start Mission Control by double-clicking on the Oracle JRockit Mission Control icon.

2. On the JVM Browser panel to the left, right-click on the Connectors folder and click on the New Connection option.

   

3. Type prodsrv01.domain.local in the Host field and 8081 in the Port field and click on the Finish button.

   

4. Right-click on the newly created connection, prodsrv01.domain.local:8081, and click on the Start Console menu option.

   

How it works…

Mission Control connects to the specified host and port defined in the Xmanagement start-up argument and starts monitoring the PROD_Server01 JVM.

Add the start-up arguments to monitor the other WebLogic instances. Mission Control can connect to any running JRockit JVM.

Monitoring Linux with SAR

A Linux host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Linux can be monitored using the SAR command-line utility. The SAR is included in the SYSSTAT package bundle and is usually included with these Linux distributions.

SAR retrieves activity counters of the operational system, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network I/O usage. By default, it keeps a history of seven days, so it is a very useful tool to retrieve past reports and quickly search for behavioral patterns.

This recipe will retrieve some statistics from the prod01 machine using the SAR command-line utility.

Getting ready

SAR should already be installed in a Red Hat or Oracle Linux distribution. If it is not installed, you can use the yum package management utility to install the SYSSTAT package, which includes SAR.

As root user, execute the yum command and follow the onscreen instructions to install SYSSTAT:

[root@prod01]$ yum install sysstat

All SAR commands are executed from the Linux shell. Log in to the host first. The root user is used only to install the SYSSTAT package.

How to do it…

To retrieve the queue length and load averages from the current day, as a wls user execute the following command:

[wls@prod01]$ sar -q

This will display the following result:

To retrieve a past CPU usage from the 21st day of the month, as a wls user execute the following command:

[wls@prod01]$ sar –u –f /var/log/sa/sa21

This will display the following result:

The default SAR configuration keeps historical data for a week.

How it works…

The SAR utility is very flexible and provides a quick way to watch the host behavior for the current day and for the past seven days. SAR runs every 10 minutes and saves a summary at the end of the day.

These are the default values in the crontab and can be adjusted.

There’s more…

Apart from the options discussed earlier, we can view more fine-grained data as well.

Collecting SAR data every minute

SAR can store statistical data in a more fine-grained time interval.

Log in as a root user to the shell and execute the following command:

[root@prod01]$ vi /etc/cron.d/sysstat

Locate the following lines:

# run system activity accounting tool every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * * root /usr/lib64/sa/sa1 1 1

Change these lines to the following:

# run system activity accounting tool every 1 minute
*/1 * * * * root /usr/lib64/sa/sa1 1 1

Type :wq! to save and close the file.