This chapter provides a road map to the detailed monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting chapters provided in this part.
Before jumping into specific monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting topics for Converged Application Server, you should step back and consider your entire system stack, from the lowest level components to the highest:
At the base of your system stack is the underlying hardware, or, in a virtualized environment, your virtual machine or hypervisor.
The next step up is your operating system.
Sitting on top of the operating system is your Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Running within the JVM, is your Converged Application Server, based itself upon the WebLogic application server, and, within that, your Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) applications themselves.
While you may be most concerned about the performance of your SIP applications, you need to make sure that all levels of your system stack are optimized and running at peak performance. For instance, if your operating system is misconfigured, no amount of WebLogic tuning can improve the reliability of your SIP applications. Likewise, system hardware defects will stop everything dead in its tracks.
Once you know that the base of your system stack is stable, that you've got ample disk space and RAM, that your operating system is patched and not running any extraneous services, only then should you proceed up the stack with tuning recommendations. With a stable base, you can be certain that performance issues, should they occur, are localized to a particular top level software component.
The following sections will go through monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting considerations for each level of the system stack, from lowest level to highest.
Hardware or virtual machine monitoring and tuning is entirely dependent on your environment. Depending upon your requirements, some things to keep in mind include:
General climate control monitoring for physical servers including temperature and humidity
Temperature monitoring for CPU and power supplies
Enclosure fan speed monitoring
Hardware reliability elements such as error correcting RAM and RAID configurations as well as manageable network interface cards
Converged Application Server is certified to run on either Oracle Linux or Solaris operating systems, and there are many resources available covering monitoring, tuning and troubleshooting topics.
For both Oracle Linux and Solaris, Oracle provides OSWatcher Black Box which is useful for OS and CPU monitoring. Oracle OSWatcher Black Box (OSWbb) collects and archives operating system and network metrics that you can use to diagnose performance issues. OSWbb operates as a set of background processes on the server and gathers data on a regular basis, invoking such Unix utilities as vmstat, netstat, iostat, and top. For information on installing and using OSWbb, see "About OSWatcher Black Box" in Oracle Linux Administrator's Solutions Guide. Note that OSWbb is also compatible with Solaris.
For complete information on tuning, and troubleshooting an Oracle Linux installation, see the Oracle Linux 6 Administrator's Guide.
For complete information on monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting Solaris installations, see the Oracle Solaris Operating Systems Documentation page, on the Oracle Help Center.
Since Converged Application Server itself runs within a JVM, you need to make sure that the JVM is correctly tuned and that you monitor it for any issues. For more information, see Chapter 16, "Monitoring, Tuning, and Troubleshooting the JVM". In that chapter, you'll find the following information:
Next, you can attend to your Converged Application Server environment.
You can use Simple Networking Management Protocol (SNMP) to monitor your Converged Application Server environment. For information on enabling and using SNMP see Chapter 17, "Configuring Converged Application Server SNMP". In that chapter you'll find the following information:
Converged Application Server debugging and tuning topics are covered in Chapter 18, "Converged Application Server Debugging and Tuning", including the following topics:
Converged Application Server provides a monitoring console for SIP applications as well as flexible overload protection facilities which let you intercept and deal with SIP application performance issues before they threaten the stability of your environment. For more information, see Chapter 19, "Converged Application Server Monitoring and Overload Protection", which covers the following topics:
Converged Application Server offers flexible logging configuration which is helpful when debugging SIP application issues. See Chapter 21, "Logging SIP Requests and Responses", which covers the following topics:
Finally, for information on general WebLogic messages, see "BEA-000001 to BEA-2163006" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Error Messages.