Monitoring the overall system performance and the throughout of
SCA requests helps you to troubleshoot problems and to evaluate the overall
processing of service components that provide the service integration logic
on your enterprise service bus.
Why and when to perform this task
The facilities for monitoring and tuning the WebSphere ESB are
provided by the underlying WebSphere Application Server,
and the techniques used are the same. This information provides an overview
of monitoring and tuning that is supplemental to the core monitoring information
provided for WebSphere Application Server.
WebSphere ESB can
exploit the tunable settings for WebSphere Application Server,
which enable you to make adjustments to better match the run-time environment
to the characteristics of your application. Many service applications can
run successfully without any changes to the default values for these tuning
parameters. Other applications might need changes, for example, a larger heap
size, to achieve optimal performance.
For a more detailed discussion
of monitoring and tuning, see the set of topics for
WebSphere Application Server,
including
When you
display a WebSphere Application Server topic,
click this button on your information center border to see the location of
the topic in the table of contents. This also enables you to see related topics
that are located in the same portion of the table of contents.
Alternatives for this task
- Monitoring the overall performance of the system
Monitoring
overall system health is of fundamental importance to understand the health
of every system involved that includes application servers, databases, enterprise
information systems used for service providers, and any other systems critical
to running your WebSphere ESB.
If any system has a problem, it might have a rippling effect and cause the
throughput of requests through the ESB to slow. IBM and several other business
partners leverage the WebSphere APIs to capture this kind of performance data
and to incorporate this data into an overall 24-by-7 monitoring solution across
multiple products. WebSphere ESB exploits
the Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) data of WebSphere Application Server to help
monitor the overall system health. PMI provides average statistics about system
resources, application resources, and system metrics. Many statistics are
available in WebSphere Application Server,
and you might want to understand the ones that most directly measure your
site to detect problems.
You can use the Tivoli Performance Viewer to
start and stop performance monitoring; view PMI data in chart or table form
as it occurs on your system; and, optionally, log the data to a file that
you can later review in the same viewer.
For more information about
the monitoring the performance of your system, see Monitoring overall system health.
- Monitoring Common Base Events fired at points in the
processing of service components.
You can configure WebSphere ESB to
capture the data in a service component at a certain event point. The Common
Event Infrastructure (CEI) is used to provide basic management services for
events. The format of those events is defined by the Common Base Event specification.
You can have this event data published to the logging facilities, or you can
use the more versatile monitoring capabilities of a Common Event Infrastructure
server.
For more information about monitoring events for service components,
see Monitoring Common Base Events.
- Monitoring the throughput of SCA requests
This information
includes understanding the flow of requests for specific mediation modules,
and for specific requesters and providers. This perspective provides the views
of specific components and databases. This perspective is important for the
in-depth internal understanding of who is using specific resources. Typically
at this stage, you deploy some type of trace through the service application,
or thread analysis under load condition techniques to isolate areas of the
application and particular interactions with the back-end systems that are
especially slow under load. In this case, WebSphere ESB provides request
metrics to help trace each individual transaction as it flows through
the ESB, recording the response time at different stages of the transaction
flow. In addition, several IBM development and monitoring tools that are based
on the request metrics technology (for example, Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction
Performance) are available to help view the transaction flow.
For more
information about monitoring the throughput of SCA requests, see Monitoring application flow.
For each
SCA module deployed on WebSphere ESB, requests being processed are held on
queue points and in the data store for messaging engines. You can display
the data for SCA requests, and if appropriate take further action to manage
the throughput of SCA requests.