4 Overview of Oracle SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition and describes how you can enable this pack and monitor SOA products such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager (BPEL Process Manager), Oracle Service Bus, Oracle SOA Suite 11g, and so on using Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

The Oracle SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition delivers comprehensive management capabilities for a Service-Oriented Architecture-based (SOA) environment. By combining SOA runtime governance, business-IT alignment, and SOA infrastructure management with Oracle's rich and comprehensive system management solution, Enterprise Manager Grid Control significantly reduces the cost and complexity of managing SOA-based environments.

Table 4-1 Highlights of Oracle SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition

Feature Benefit

Centralized management console

Provides administrators managing SOA environments with a consolidated browser-based view of the entire enterprise, thereby enabling them to monitor and manage all of their components from a central location.

Discovery and service modeling

Provides discovery of the following:

  • Oracle SOA Infrastructure deployed to the WebLogic Server.

  • Oracle SOA Composite applications deployed to the SOA Infrastructure.

  • Oracle BPEL processes deployed to the Oracle BPEL Process Manager (BPEL Process Manager) server and the dependent partner links.

  • Oracle Service Bus-based business and proxy services.

  • Service modeling offers out-of-the-box automated system modeling capabilities for the SOA infrastructure.

Runtime governance

Defines SOAP tests to measure and record availability and performance of partner links (or any Web service) and business/proxy services for historical trending, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis purposes. Also provides an error hospital of process instances with drilldowns into instance details.

Infrastructure management

Monitors the availability and performance of the SOA infrastructure components. Both current and historic availability of targets (such as BPEL Process Manager or Oracle Service Bus) are recorded for troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

Configuration management

Collects configuration information for the BPEL Process Manager server/domains/processes and Oracle Service Bus. The parameters can be refreshed, saved, or compared with another target. Different versions of the same target can also be compared.

Deployment automation

Automates the deployment of the following:

  • SOA Artifacts Provisioning: This includes provisioning of SOA Composites, Oracle WebLogic Server Policies, Assertion Templates, and JPS Policy and Credential Stores.

  • BPEL processes on BPEL Process Managers

  • Oracle Service Bus resources from a source OSB domain to a target OSB domain.

For detailed information on the provisioning procedures, see Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide for Software and Server Provisioning and Patching.

Adapter metrics

Provides throughput and error metrics for different adapters in graphical format.

Business-IT alignment

Enables you to consolidate their IT and business management tools into a unified system. BAM-EM integration unites business KPIs and system metrics in one system for correlation and trending.

Service level management

Enables you to monitor services from the end-user's perspective using service tests or synthetic transactions, model relationships between services and underlying IT components, and report on achieved service levels.

Application Dependency and Performance

Enables you to manage your SOA solutions by leveraging a model-driven top-down approach within your development, quality assurance (QA), staging, and production environments. Business application owners and operational staff can automatically discover your BPEL workflows and correlate them with the underlying Web services; Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs); and back-end Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) resources through detailed modeling and drill-down directly into the performance metrics at the component level.

For more information, see Chapter 15, "Introduction to Application Dependency and Performance"

Historical analysis and reporting

Store the collected metric and configuration data in a central repository, thereby enabling administrators to analyze metrics through various historical views and facilitate strategic trend analysis and reporting.

Instance Tracing

Allows you to trace the message flow across SOA Composites and SOA Infrastructure instances monitored by Enterprise Manager Grid Control.