Access Manager Services are business critical and must always be available to control user access to an organization's protected web services and applications. Because hardware, network connectivity issues and other failures can happen, HeartBeat monitoring can be leveraged by Load Balancers to ensure user traffic is routed to healthy OAM Servers.
For example, when there is a firewall installed between a User Agent or WebGate (10 or 11g) and the 10g or 11g Access Manager server, perimeter devices can check availability of the Access Manager server (its health) by hitting its HeartBeat URL. The following sections contain details.
The firewall determines this connection is idle after 30-40 minutes of inactivity (depending on its configuration) and terminates the socket connection but does not inform/notify the WebGate or Access Manager server. In this case, when a request for a resource arrives at the WebGate and it sends a OAP message to the Access Manager server, it uses the existing connection and waits for a reply. Because the connection was dropped by the firewall, the WebGate does not receive any reply; so it waits for the TCP timeout. Following the TCP timeout, WebGate understands the message channel is of no use and starts the process to get a new message channel. TCP timeout is OS specific and may vary from several minutes to hours which makes the WebGate unable to process user requests.
Note:
The setKeepAlive
WebGate parameter ensures that load balancers do not drop the OAP connection. See Table 15-2 for details.
The OAM monitoring model allows Web Tier components (load balancers) to ping an OAM Managed Server's HeartBeat endpoint at a scheduled interval over HTTP(S). This allows Web Tier components to route incoming HTTP traffic away from unhealthy OAM Managed Server(s).
Every OAM Managed Server exposes this HeartBeat URL:
Scheme://ManagedServerHost:ManagedServerPort/oam/server/HeartBeat
In this URL, the following is true:
scheme = https | http
ManagedServerHost = Host name of the Access Manager WLS Managed Server
ManagedServerPort = Port used by the Access Manager WLS Managed Server
The HeartBeat URL works as follows:
Note:
Neither the health status test results or check results can be communicated in the body of the HTTP Response. A successful heartbeat check will return the HTTP code 200.