This chapter describes how to monitor and manage Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Elastic Charging Engine (ECE).
The managing of ECE nodes is centralized through the use of a driver machine. Any machine on which you have established password-less SSH and installed the Groovy Shell (groovysh) and set Groovy in its PATH can be used as the driver machine. Typically, the machine on which ECE is initially installed becomes the driver machine.
You can configure ECE on the driver machine and then push out the configuration from that one machine to all server machines in the cluster. The primary applications used for managing ECE are the Elastic Charging Controller (ECC) and Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications (you install Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications as a plug-in on an existing Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instance). You install these applications on the driver machine.
You can monitor ECE nodes (server processes) by using Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications, by using JConsole, or by using ECC. Each tool affords different degrees of operation and monitoring capabilities.
A system administrator who wants to maintain, update and tune the ECE system will use ECC.
A systems operator who wants to monitor the ECE system and perform basic operational tasks will use Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications.
Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications monitors several things including:
The nodes that are running
The nodes that are stopped
The performance of charging server nodes
Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications provides management capabilities for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) and other supported Oracle Communications applications. For detailed information about the management capabilities provided by Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications, see Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications System Administrator's Guide.
JConsole shows:
The nodes that are running
When one of the charging server nodes is JMX enabled, you can obtain statistics about all charging server nodes in the cluster by using JConsole.
JConsole also enables you to change ECE configurations that are exposed through JMX.
ECC lists
The nodes that are running
The nodes that are stopped
You can add and remove a node from your topology by using ECC as well as perform various other management task. You use ECC, a command line application, for day-to-day administration, managing and operating of the ECE system.
You can also use ECC to synchronize the ECE installation on the driver machine to different machines. You first provision the different machines as required for having ECE installed and then you run the ECC sync command to synchronize the installation onto the machines.
See "Using the Elastic Charging Controller to Manage Nodes" for more information.
You can configure a charging-server health threshold so that you are alerted when Elastic Charging Server node failures threaten the ability of your system to handle your customer base. See "Configuring Charging-Server Health Thresholds" for more information.
You can set alerts for ECE when you use Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications (a plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control) for monitoring ECE nodes. For detailed information about the management capabilities provided by Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications, see Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications System Administrator's Guide.
ECE error log files provide detailed information about system problems. If you have a problem with an ECE process or node, look in its corresponding log file in the ECE_Home/oceceserver/logs directory. This directory contains the log where log files are generated for each node on each machine of your topology.
You can use JConsole for configuring log levels on each node (to manage the node's logging levels). When using the configuration service, select the MBeans tab and expand the navigation tree of the ECE Logging MBean.
See "Configuring Logging" for information about configuring logging parameters.
To monitor the health status of the Rated Event Formatter processes, you look at the Rated Event Formatter log files. If you use Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Communications, you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to check the Rated Event Formatter log files.