Understanding Portal Server Monitoring

Monitoring helps record runtime resource information about portal server. Desktop monitoring keeps record of information on requests received by portal server for content, edit, and process types. It also records information on the minimum, maximum and average response time for each type of request for the different channels of portal server.

Information gathered from monitoring portal activity is useful to optimize portal response time either by moving channels that need a higher response time to separate secondary tab, or by setting the time-out property for Desktop channels based on cache hits.

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a portal server collects monitoring data for the Desktop. Monitoring information can be viewed on portal server management console, or can be accessed using psadmin monitoring subcommands. See Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Command Line Reference.

Monitoring uses Java Management Extensions (JMX^TM technology) and registers Management Beans (MBeans) in the portal server instance's MBeansServer that represents portal server Desktop and portal Desktop channels. Each MBean attribute represents monitoring data collected for each resource. The portal management console and psadmin monitoring subcommands communicate with MBeans to collect and present monitoring data for a portal server instance.