OSB Monitoring Configuration/SLA/Pipeline Alerts

I hope this post is helpful for the beginners out there who are getting started on Oracle Service Bus.

We are going to talk about the various Out of the Box features provided by OSB with respect to Monitoring, SLA Agreements , blah blah.

This is just at the basic level so that the intended audience can find it helpful.
By now, I am sure you understand that there are many functions that you can implement only on the OSB web console which cannot be done through the eclipse IDE.

Configuring Monitoring:

• Once the Proxy Service has been developed and deployed, start the server and open up OSB Console to enable monitoring.
  (Monitoring can be enabled only through the sbconsole and not through OEP for Eclipse)
• Through the Project Explorer, go the Proxy Service for which you want monitoring to be enabled. In this example, we would be selecting HelloWorldService proxy service (which is just another proxy service in my OSB project. Please feel free to choose the one you would like from your project.

• Click on the ProxyService and then click on the “Operational Settings” tab as shown below.

• Monitoring - Operational Features
• Create a session using the Change Center
• Enable Monitoring by clicking on the Checkbox besides “Monitoring”. The Aggregation Interval is the period over which aggregated statistics related to the service are computed for display in the Oracle Service Bus Console dashboard. By default it is kept at 10 minutes.
• Update this setting and Activate the session.
• Once enabled, you can view the Monitoring Statistics from the Dashboard. Click on Operations in the sbconsole, and the list of all the entities monitored are displayed on the right side of the page under the tab Service Health as shown below.

Defining SLA (Service Level Agreement)

A great feature of the Oracle Service Bus is the usage of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This will give you operational information when services are running and are not compliant with your SLA. For example a service may not take longer than 50 ms or a service must be executed 500 times during a certain period.

The SLA Manager allows users to configure SLA Rule conditions. It monitors SLA violations with the help of the data provided by the aggregator and sends notifications as configured in the alert rule actions.

Here’s a tip on how to remember about what SLA Alert Rule and Alert Destination mean.

- SLA Alert Rules specify what condition will trigger that alert

- SLA Alert Destination specify what to do when you get the Alert triggered.

What we are going to do in the following section is – Configure an Alert rule (specifying the condition based on which the alert will be triggered) and an Alert Destination (which will tell OSB what to do when it generates the alert).

Before specifying the conditions for an Alert Rule, it is necessary that we configure the Alert Destination first, (because you will be asked for the Alert Destination when you are configuring the Alert Rule).

Now, we are going to have a configuration that is going to send out the Alerts triggered to a mailbox.

How to set Alert Destinations for emails in case of SLA Violations .

• The first step is to configure an alert destination which we would be using in the SLA Alerting. And for Email Alerts to be successfully sent, we would need a SMTP Server in our configuration. Below are the steps that outline how to create a SMTP Server.
• Configure an SMTP Server as shown below by right clicking on the OSB Configuration project. (you can do this both in using the Eclipse IDE or the SBCONSOLE)

- Once the SMTP Server is set up, the next step is to create an Alert Destinations. Alert Destination basically contains the list of recipients that will be notified in case of an alert configured in the Proxy Service flow. Create an alert destination under OSB Project.

- Configure the Alert Destination by furnishing the details necessary. In the recipients section, you can mention the email address to whom you want the Alert to be sent to.

- Next, we would be using this Alert Destination for our case of Service Level Agreement Alerts.

- Let us create a rule for the business service – Employee_BizService.

- In SBCONSOLE, navigate in Project explorer to the Business service and click on Employee_BizService, and click on the tab meant for SLA Alert Rules as shown below