Monitoring PDC in a Cloud Native Environment

18 Monitoring PDC in a Cloud Native Environment

Learn how to monitor Pricing Design Center (PDC) in your Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) cloud native environment by using external applications.

Topics in this document:

About Monitoring PDC Cloud Native

You use the following external applications to monitor operations in PDC cloud native:

WebLogic Monitoring Exporter: Use this Oracle web application to scrape runtime information from PDC and then export the metric data in Prometheus format. It exposes different WebLogic Mbeans metrics, such as memory usage and sessions count, that are required for monitoring and maintaining the PDC application deployed on the server.
Prometheus: Use this open-source toolkit to aggregate and store the PDC metric data scraped by the WebLogic Monitoring Exporter.

You can install a standalone version of Prometheus or Prometheus Operator. If you install Prometheus Operator, PDC adds a ServiceMonitor that declaratively specifies how to monitor groups of services. It automatically generates the Prometheus scrape configuration based on the definition.
Grafana: Use this open-source tool to view on a graphical dashboard all PDC metric data stored in Prometheus.

To configure Grafana for displaying PDC metric data, see "Getting Started with Grafana" in the Grafana documentation.

Setting Up Monitoring in PDC Cloud Native

Setting up monitoring in PDC cloud native involves these high-level tasks:

Deploying Prometheus in one of the following ways:
- Deploy a standalone version of Prometheus. See "Installation" in the Prometheus documentation.
- Deploy Prometheus Operator. See "prometheus-operator" on the GitHub website.
For the list of compatible software versions, see "BRM Cloud Native Deployment Software Compatibility" in BRM Compatibility Matrix.
Configuring Prometheus to scrape data and send alerts. For more information, see "Configuration" in the Prometheus documentation.
Installing Grafana. See "Install Grafana" in the Grafana documentation for information.
For the list of compatible software versions, see "BRM Cloud Native Deployment Software Compatibility" in BRM Compatibility Matrix.
Enabling monitoring in your PDC cloud native deployment:
1. In the override-values.yaml file for oc-cn-helm-chart, set the ocpdc.configEnv.monitoring.isEnabled key to true.
2. If you are using Prometheus Operator, also set these keys:
  - ocpdc.configEnv.monitoring.prometheus.operator.isEnabled: Set this to true.
  - ocpdc.configEnv.monitoring.prometheus.operator.namespace: Set this to the namespace of the Prometheus Operator.
3. Run the helm upgrade command to update the Helm release:
```
helm upgrade BrmReleaseName oc-cn-helm-chart --values OverrideValuesFile -n BrmNameSpace
```
  where:
  - BrmReleaseName is the release name for oc-cn-helm-chart and is used to track this installation instance.
  - OverrideValuesFile is the file name and path to your override-values.yaml file.
  - BrmNameSpace is the name space in which to create BRM Kubernetes objects for the BRM Helm chart.
  WebLogic Monitoring Exporter is installed in your cloud native environment.
Edit the wls-exporter-config.yaml file to include the PDC metrics that you want to monitor. For the list of metrics that can be used with PDC, see "WebLogic-Based Application Metrics".
To create custom metrics for monitoring PDC, do the following:
1. Create a Python file that defines the custom metrics that you want scraped from PDC.
  
  For more information, see "Writing Client Libraries" in the Prometheus Instrumenting documentation.
2. Set the wls-exporter-config.yaml file's permission to:
```
chown 1000:1000
chmod 777
```
3. Move your Python file to the HostPath specified in the ocpdc.volMnt.pdcHostPath key.

Run the helm upgrade command to update your BRM Helm release:

helm upgrade BrmReleaseName oc-cn-helm-chart --values OverrideValuesFile -n BrmNameSpace