Shield Your Applications from Catastrophe

Transcription

1 white paper Healthy or better-performing apps can save uptime, customers. Shield Your Applications from Catastrophe Whether they reside on the company s internal servers or are accessible via the Web from desktop PCs or mobile devices, the applications a business uses to run its operations are ever-growing. The number and complexity of enterprise applications, particularly those based on Java and other Web technologies, are changing the nature of IT management. Today the entire organization must focus on delivering these applications to internal and external users when and how they need them. IT needs to ensure that applications meet optimal performance levels in terms of business priority and other requirements. A recent survey of IT administrators found that the three biggest problems facing them are long response times of the application/database, application quality shortfalls and application downtime. More tellingly, they also agreed that the primary way they find out about these problems is through calls from end users.

2 It s no wonder that IT spends as much as 80 percent of its problem resolution time on merely isolating the issue. The problems are equally challenging for custom and packaged applications. Under these constraints, companies risk losing customers at a time when no company can afford to suffer these losses. If visitors to your Website can t quickly download information or place an order, they will readily go to another site to do business. Here are some other scenarios in which IT needs real-time information to solve an issue or optimize a process: n A manager at an e-commerce shoe site needs to track daily sales of women s shoes or to understand why a promotion has not resulted in expected sales. n Call center operators cannot adequately handle inbound calls or focus on sales, because applications slow down the process or are not available. n In a hospital ER, every second counts. If a clinician can t quickly pull up a medical history before administering treatment, the patient may suffer grave consequences during the delay. n Custom scripting makes it difficult to set up global policies. n With every release of the underlying application server technology, the management solution may suffer due to incompatibilities between existing scripts and updated or new application server APIs. A better solution is offered by Oracle WebLogic Server. The product offers several key advantages: n Oracle WebLogic Server is the market-leading application server and has a solid track record in providing an enterprise-grade Java platform. n Judging from the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, it is the best-performing application server. n It provides high scalability with advanced clustering features and extremely high reliability and availability. n Oracle WebLogic Server, combined with Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit and virtualization capabilities, provides a powerful software platform for cloud computing. Having the proper application infrastructure in place is a critical first step to improving performance for users. Modern applications are almost exclusively built on application server technologies. An application server provides the execution platform for applications and, in some cases, also manages the resources, providing capabilities such as load-balancing and clustering for better availability and performance. To ensure that applications run optimally, IT professionals should consider a two-pronged approach: 1. Select the best application server technology for their application runtime environment. 2. Invest in a management solution that provides deep insight into the application server platform as well as the end-to-end application environment. To address the second requirement for management, Oracle offers Oracle Enterprise Manager. In addition to managing the application server, the product manages applications, databases and the underlying systems. The rest of this paper explores Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, examining its strengths for managing applications that run on Oracle WebLogic Server. Simplify Management and Monitoring of Application Servers To gain control, IT needs a comprehensive, integrated management solution for the application server platform. Managing Oracle WebLogic Server across the enterprise and multiple domains requires specialized functionality that surpasses the basic monitoring and log mining offered by most systems management vendors. There are several choices for meeting the first requirement. For example, some organizations use open source application servers that provide strong Java platforms. These solutions invariably don t meet the second requirement, integrated management, however. They leave the IT operations team members to their own devices to develop and maintain management scripts and command-line utilities to manage the entire application environment. There are several drawbacks to this approach: n Maintaining custom scripts is time-consuming and requires a lot of resources. Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition, within Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, offers one toolset for consolidating application server management. This toolset enables IT organizations to centrally monitor Oracle WebLogic Server domains and instances, perform end-to-end monitoring down to the individual transaction level and automate configuration management and lifecycle management. This enables your business to maximize the performance and availability of Oracle WebLogic Server deployments, thereby white paper: WebLogic 2

3 avoiding unnecessary hardware purchases, reducing management complexity and lowering labor costs. Highlights of Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition include n The ability to manage one or more Oracle WebLogic domains, including the clusters, servers, application deployments, and Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) within each of the domains n Automation of application lifecycle tasks such as testing, deployment, changes and upgrades and retirement n Exception management alerts and discovery of transaction flows across the enterprise n Diagnotics and tuning for Java EE and Web service applications n Deep JVM diagnostics with cross-tier database correlation n Management of configuration changes n Automated deployment and scale-out procedures To demonstrate how organizations with complex application infrastructures can benefit from this management solution, consider the case of Delta Dental, a group of affiliated member companies providing dental benefit plans for employers, groups and individuals. In 2009 Delta Dental member companies covered more than 53 million subscribers and processed more than 84 million dental claims. Critical to success is a company s ability to manage applications and technologies without missing key deadlines. Delta Dental must routinely process large files containing millions of transactions within 24 hours. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, the IT organization has been able to shave several hours off its file processing time by eliminating bottlenecks. The organization is also improving its adherence to service-level requirements. In a call center application, for instance, managers receive alerts when SLAs are breached. Historical analysis of data helps IT personnel understand usage patterns and perform root cause analysis. One of the key benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g to the IT organization is the ability to monitor both the Oracle WebLogic middleware infrastructure and the Oracle Database infrastructure from a single console. Another organization that is using Oracle products to manage its application infrastructure is the Michigan Information Systems and Services Division, which supports several business processes and transactions for member companies, including claim submission, claim payment, client eligibility updates, billing and collection. Its IT environment includes Oracle Database, Oracle s PeopleSoft product line, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle WebLogic Portal, Oracle WebLogic Integration, Oracle Service Bus, and Oracle Business Intelligence 11g. Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition in Depth Following is a review of the key functionality areas of the management pack. Application Performance Management Users don t care about server performance, but they do care about metrics such as how long it takes to load pages on the Website, how many orders are successfully completed per day, how many orders are delayed due to technical issues and at what point in the process customers have abandoned orders. To answer these questions, IT needs a business-driven approach to application management. The ability to map IT events and systems onto user-initiated transaction or business transactions helps IT to focus on what matters the most to the end user and quickly determine the source of any failure and understanding how to troubleshoot across IT silos. Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition enables IT to track real-time and historical transactions across the entire infrastructure and all applications without changing or modifying the transactions. A single dashboard provides an endto-end view of transactions across systems and services. This leads to faster troubleshooting without requiring deep knowledge of the application code. You can look at a user ID or transaction ID and trace the process from there. Once you ve discovered the source of the problem, you can determine its business correlation, such as loss of revenues, and the product group associated with the transaction. With Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition, you can also n Manage multiple server farms and Oracle WebLogic domains centrally n Add several Oracle WebLogic domains or scale out an existing Oracle WebLogic cluster in one simple operation through the command-line interface or the built-in wizard n Access custom dashboards for monitoring multiple Oracle WebLogic domains n Specify critical and warning thresholds n Automatically discover and model dependencies between Java components, frameworks and Web services n Correlate monitoring data between Oracle WebLogic and the white paper: WebLogic 3

4 underlying operating system, in both virtualized and nonvirtualized environments Configuration Management Manual processes and incompleteness of data related to configurations are sore issues for system administrators. The inability to manage and update their configurations efficiently can have a negative impact on the bottom line in terms of unplanned downtime. They may not be able to quickly determine, for example, which servers are associated with which virtual machines, applications or databases. Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition includes advanced configuration management features that capture and centralize information about hardware and software resources for better asset tracking and management. You can manage configurations across the entire application server lifecycle, including development, QA, production and disaster recovery. Core features of the configuration tool enable you to n Automatically discover assets and provide easy-to-understand configuration metrics n Correlate configuration changes with performance changes in order to quickly alleviate issues n Manage and reduce configuration drift with configuration synchronization n Modify the runtime configuration of Oracle Coherence nodes, services and caches n Identify the impact of system changes that may come from other cross-tier components, such as OS upgrades or patches to applications and related infrastructure n Do real-time updates on configuration changes to files, users, processes, updates and patches n Improve compliance through user-defined policies in Oracle Enterprise Manager, for standard configuration and security settings n Receive alerts and notifications related to noncompliance n Change tracking to ensure that settings and patches are standard across development and production environments Service-Level Management Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition helps IT organizations achieve high availability, high performance and optimal service levels for business transactions across heterogeneous environments. It monitors all flavors of application services, including SOAP and XML services, and virtually any application service or legacy component, including database queries. It can monitor the impact of a change of one service on other services, applications and components. Reviewing user-level data is critical to understanding and controlling the systems that execute transactions. IT can see who is initiating the services and segment these users and customers to monitor quality of service. The management pack provides detailed usage analysis and reporting capabilities so that you can identify trends for proactive management as well as revenue opportunities. By optimizing service levels, you can eliminate performance slowdowns for customers performing transactions on your Website or for employees processing and managing orders, for instance. Key service-level management features of the pack enable you to n Proactively monitor service performance levels through real-time metrics and alerts n Set and monitor SLAs for individual services, processes and transactions n Assess the business impact of any service problem or failure n Define different SLAs for discrete business segments n Monitor services from end users perspectives n Prioritize service use by any business criteria n Focus on SLAs for the most-valuable users n Deliver the best quality of service during peak hours Operations Automation Initial installation and provisioning for Oracle WebLogic Server has been automated through Oracle s installer software and Oracle Enterprise Manager. For ongoing management needs, cloning application servers constitutes the bulk of installation-related effort. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides automation tools to help administrators avoid unnecessary script writing and manual operations for this purpose. Using Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition, IT can automate deployment of additional servers using predefined configurations. This capability eliminates manual and error-prone approaches and additionally ensures that new deployments are always compliant with existing policies. For instance, creating a new environment to support SOA applications requires several time-consuming manual installation and configuration steps. The management pack automatically clones Oracle WebLogic Server software from one environment to white paper: WebLogic 4

5 another. After completion of the cloning operation, the newly created middleware environment is visible in the console for centralized management and monitoring. Agility is another benefit here. Modern datacenters must be able to reallocate resources quickly to meet new business priorities and shifts in demand. Now administrators can rapidly scale out an Oracle WebLogic Server domain and cluster with additional managed servers to support growing application workloads. The management pack also helps resolve problems faster. When critical errors occur in Oracle WebLogic Server, the tool automatically collects diagnostic data and uploads it to Oracle Support. Coherence Management Oracle Coherence helps store application objects and enables high throughput, reduced response time, predictable scalability, high availability and reliability in critical business applications. It achieves that by distributing objects to multiple JVMs running on the network. The proper management and monitoring of Oracle Coherence is a fundamental part of overall application performance monitoring. Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition offers a comprehensive management solution for Oracle Coherence, including real-time and historical monitoring of Oracle Coherence caches, provisioning of Oracle Coherence clusters or nodes, events management, lifecycle management, proactive events monitoring and configuration management. Application Server Management with Customers in Mind Companies that derive the most value from using Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition are enterprises experiencing a high degree of modernization and transformation of their IT assets. They are moving into cloud computing and managing distributed, service-oriented architectures, so they have application environments with many moving parts that are hard to control. What we see in circumstances where clients are applying traditional methodologies to resolve problems is that they typically burn through about $200,000 per incident, says Marc Rix, CEO of Bridgescape, a systems integrator and Oracle Gold partner with clients in energy, healthcare and finance. Panic sets in very early, because objective data that points to the root cause of the problem is typically missing. In the absence of intelligent metrics, everybody switches to intuition mode, digging up any data What we see in circumstances where clients are applying traditional methodologies to resolve problems is that they typically burn through about $200,000 per incident. Marc Rix, CEO, Bridgescape they can find and struggling to manually correlate it somehow into a transaction flow that relates to the end user s experience. Determining what users are experiencing and why is often guesswork. That gets expensive fast for a large company. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition to introduce an app-to-disk, end-user-focused approach to problem resolution and prevention, clients of Bridgescape are seeing annual incident resolution costs decrease by 75 percent or more. Mediaset, a major Italian television broadcaster based in Milan, has three million customers of its free and pay-per-view content and processes at least 100,000 transactions per day. If the company s system, based on Oracle s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM), goes down or is too slow to support a transaction, Mediaset will lose the customer, says Mediaset software architect Max Pellizzaro. Oracle Enterprise Manager helps the company be more proactive by measuring SLAs, response time, database connection and adapter connection and correlating data between various Oracle technologies. That not only helps Mediaset prevent problems from escalating but has also saved money on capital expenditures. We can spend on developing solutions instead of just buying new hardware, Pellizzaro explains. Managing infrastructure with the end user in mind is the ultimate goal of IT. And there s no reason a complex, distributed environment should stand in your way. With a simpler and more centralized management view, IT can ensure that applications are always running optimally to minimize disruptions to the business. To survive, organizations need to transition from a legacy-system-based management approach to a modern one in which administrators can easily connect the dots between systems, transactions, services and user behavior and see trends before they have an impact on their customers and revenue streams. white paper: WebLogic 5