Introduction

IBM WebSphere Application Server, a software application server, is the flagship product within IBM's WebSphere brand. WAS is built using open standards such as J2EE, XML, and Web Services. It works with a number of web servers including Apache HTTP Server, Netscape Enterprise Server, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), IBM HTTP Server for i5/OS, IBM HTTP Server for z/OS, and IBM HTTP Server for AIX/Linux/Microsoft Windows/Solaris. It delivers the secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure you need for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Like any other application server, performance setbacks suffered by the WebSphere application server too can affect the availability of critical services it supports. To avoid such an eventuality, you need to continuously monitor the performance of the WebSphere application server.

The eG Enterprise facilitates 24x7 monitoring of the WebSphere application server and proactive alerting of probable error conditions detected on the server. Since different versions of the WebSphere application server vary in both capabilities and architecture, eG Enterprise employs different mechanisms to monitor the various versions. This is why, eG Enterprise provides two separate monitoring models for WebSphere Application server – one for version 4.0 (or 5.1) of the server, and another for version 6.0 and above. While it uses the component-type WebSphere Application – 4/5.x to monitor the former, the component-type WebSphere Application is used for monitoring the latter. This chapter discusses both these models in great detail.