10 Developing a Production Maintenance Plan

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle WebCenter maintenance tasks and tools. The purpose of this chapter is to help you scope administrative responsibilities for the Oracle WebCenter so that you can develop a maintenance plan.

This chapter includes the following topics:

Periodic Tasks
Monitoring Oracle WebCenter Services
Monitoring Databases and Java Application Servers
Monitoring Usage
Troubleshooting Tools

Periodic Tasks

The following table provides suggestions for periodic tasks that you should consider as part of your production system maintenance plan.

Frequency	Task
Daily	Modify security of portlets, communities, and other objects in the portal. Modify permission roles for users. Publish new and existing applications/portlets to remote servers. Monitor portal, database, and remote servers alerts for CPU, memory, and hard disk usage to ensure availability.
Weekly	Install releases to one or more software components.
Monthly	Add new hardware to the environment (for example, new remote servers, new hard disk, and so on).
Ad Hoc	Install Oracle WebCenter patches. Install server patches from critical third-party software providers, such as operating system and anti-virus software.

Monitoring Oracle WebCenter Services

The Counter Monitoring System collects information from various performance counters for portal applications and exposes them for diagnosis and review. This system can be used to examine counters from any Oracle WebCenter application that resides on a remote host, provided the both the remote host and the counter monitoring system are on a network in which they can reach each other via UDP.

With the Counter Monitoring System you can:

Set up counter logging files in your desired format to view counter information.
Use the Counter Monitoring console to request specific counter data in real time.
Use the Windows Perfmon utility to view portal counter data, if you use a Windows system.

For detailed information on the Counter Monitoring System, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Monitoring Databases and Java Application Servers

Databases support Performance Monitor counters on Windows. WebLogic, Tomcat, and WebSphere do not. For information on performance monitoring for application servers, refer to the related application server documentation.

Monitoring Usage

Oracle WebCenter Analytics is an advanced usage tracking and analytics tool designed exclusively for Oracle WebCenter. This portal add-on enables you to assess portal ROI and define future opportunities with usage trends in mind. Oracle WebCenter Analytics delivers the following features out of the box:

Usage Tracking Metrics: Tracks metrics for common portal functions, including community, portlet, collaboration project, and document hits, as well as search queries, logins, and more.
Behavior tracking: Tracks usage patterns, such as number and duration of visits.
User Profile Correlation: Correlates metrics with user profile information. In this way, usage tracking reports can be viewed and filtered by profile data, such as country, company and department.

Oracle WebCenter Analytics includes the following reports that you can customize by setting filtering, grouping, and presentation options.

Report	Description	Features
Community Traffic	Displays traffic information for each community in the portal.	Displays traffic in three ways: Hits: Count of page views within the community. Visits: Count of visits to the community, each visit can consist of several hits. Users: Count of unique users who have visited the community. Users can select to see the most active, least active, or a select list of communities.
Community Response Time	Displays average, maximum and minimum response time for each community within the portal.	Calculates response time as the time between the portal receiving a community page request until the time an HTML response is sent to the client. Users can select to see the slowest response times, fastest response times, or response times for a select list of communities.
Portlet Usage	Shows usage statistics within gatewayed portlets.	Displays traffic in two ways: Activity: Count of hits on an object (for example, a button or link) within a portlet. Users: Count of unique users who have performed an activity within the portlet. Users can select to see the most active, least active, or a select list of portlets.
Portal Traffic	Shows an aggregate of all portal page views within the portal.
Portal Users	Displays statistics regarding portal user accounts.	Displays the following four figures to help explain user inception and activity. Total user accounts in the portal. Added (new) user accounts created in the portal during a given date range. Active users defined by activity during a given date range. Inactive users defined by inactivity during a given date range
Portal Logins	Shows an aggregate of all portal logins.
Portal Duration	Displays the length of visits to the portal.	Calculate visit durations as the time between login and logoff or the time between login and inactivity for a configurable length of time. This report shows both average and maximum visit duration.
Search Keywords	Shows the top search keywords entered in searches within the portal.	See the top 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 search keyword phrases entered within the portal.
Document Views	Shows statistics for document views in the portal.	Can display these statistics in two ways: Top Documents: List of top documents viewed with view count. Folders: Count of all document views by folders in the knowledge directory.

Troubleshooting Tools

This section describes logging and troubleshooting tools. It includes the following topics:

Oracle WebCenter Logging Utilities
View Source

For details on portlet debugging, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Oracle WebCenter Logging Utilities

Oracle WebCenter Logging Utilities includes three log message receivers that allow for a wide variety of logging solutions. In the OpenLog Framework, log message receivers act to display or store log messages generated by log message senders, such as the portal or Oracle WebCenter Collaboration. Oracle WebCenter Logging Utilities include:

Logging Spy. Previously called PTSpy, this utility is the primary log message receiver for the OpenLog Framework. In addition to displaying log messages from the portal and other Oracle WebCenter products and services, Logging Spy provides fine-grained filtering, viewing of saved log files, highlighting of errors, and the searching and sorting of log messages.
Logger. Logger runs as an unattended background process that receives log messages from the OpenLog Framework and writes the messages to the file system. In addition to this primary use, the Logger can be configured to provide output in other ways, such as sending log messages to an e-mail system.
Console Logger. The Console Logger runs in a console window, writing log messages to the console standard output. The Console Logger has limited use; in most cases, it is preferable to use Logging Spy.

For information on using these utilities, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction for Windows or the Oracle Fusion Middleware Upgrade Guide for Oracle WebCenter Interaction for Unix and Linux.

View Source

HTML code creates Web pages. In turn, Oracle WebCenter Activity Spaces generate HTML code. Along with HTML from the View and Display pages, the underlying framework inserts some general information for each page. If there is an error on the page, the Error framework might insert additional debugging information. You can review the HTML source for any given Web page to gather this information. Often the HTML for a given error page contains detailed information about the error.

When to Use View Source

Use View Source to gather more information when you receive an error on a portal page or when you want some general information about the page. For example, use View Source if you receive the following error message on a portal page: "An unexpected error occurred when trying to start the Editor." The message itself gives no clues to the source of the error, but when you view the HTML source code for the page, you might be able to determine the source of the error.

How to Use View Source

While viewing the Web page, in the browser menu, click View > Source. This displays the HTML for that page. If the browser menu is unavailable, sometimes it is possible to view source by right-clicking the page and then clicking View Source. With this approach, be aware that if there are frames, only the source for the frame in which you right-clicked will display. When the source displays, you can search for specific pieces of information as described in the next section.

What Is Available in View Source

Each portal page contains several pieces of general information:

To determine the server hosting the portal, search for "Hostname:". The hostname of the server is commented in the source: "".
To find information about the build of the portal, search for "Portal Version:", "Clingiest:", and "Build Date:".
To find information about general timing data points, search for "Total Request Time:", "Control Time:", "Page Construction Time:", and "Page Display Time:".

If there is an error on the page, View Source might provide extended information. There are three items that you can search for:

To view the error, search for "alert Error Title". You might have to repeat the search because several error related Tanglements might use that text.
To view extended information, search for "Extended Error Message:". The extended error is wrapped in an HTMLComment and thus does not show up on the page, "". The extended information, controlled by the developer and Activity Space, is frequently the same as the error message that displays in the user interface.
You might also need to search for "unexpected error". When the portal encounters an unexpected error, the stack trace for the error is often inserted into an HTMLComment. The following example informs the user where the error originates from. The user then has a starting point from which to perform further debugging:
```
<!--An unexpected error occurred when trying to start the Editor.: 
com.plumtree.openfoundation.util.XPException: An unexpected error occurred when trying to start the Editor.
at com.plumtree.portalpages.admin.editors.group.GroupModel.DoTaskOnStartEditor(GroupModel.java:411)
```