Introduction

BEA WebLogic Server is a fully-featured, standards-based application server providing the foundation on which an enterprise can build reliable, scalable, and manageable applications. With its comprehensive set of features, compliance with open standards, multi-tiered architecture, and support for component-based development, WebLogic Server provides the underlying core functionality necessary for the development and deployment of business-driven applications. Any issue with the functioning of the WebLogic server, if not troubleshooted on time, can rupture the very core of these business-critical applications, causing infrastructure downtime and huge revenue losses. This justifies the need for continuously monitoring the external availability and internal operations of the WebLogic server.

eG Enterprise provides two distinct models for monitoring WebLogic servers - the WebLogic model and the WebLogic (6/7/8) model. As the names suggest, the WebLogic 6/7/8 model can be used to monitor the WebLogic server version 6, 7, and 8, and the WebLogic model can be used for monitoring WebLogic 9.0 (and above).

Regardless of the model used, the metrics obtained enable administrators to find answers to the following persistent performance questions:

Server monitoring	Is the WebLogic process running? Is the memory usage of the server increasing over time? Is the server's request processing rate unusually high?
JVM monitoring	Is the JVM heap size adequate? Is the garbage collection tuned well or is the JVM spending too much time in garbage collection?
Thread monitoring	Are the WebLogic servers execute queues adequately sized? Are there too many threads waiting to be serviced, thereby causing slow response time?
Security monitoring	How many invalid login attempts have been made to the WebLogic server? Are these attempts recurring?
JMS monitoring	Are there many pending messages in the messaging server? Is the message traffic unusually high?
Connector monitoring	What is the usage pattern of connections in a connector pool?
Cluster monitoring	Are all the WebLogic servers in the cluster currently available? Is the load being balanced across the cluster?
Transaction monitoring	How many user transactions are happening? Are there too many rollbacks occurring?
Servlet monitoring	Which servlet(s) are being extensively accessed? What is the average invocation time for each servlet?
EJB Pool monitoring	Are there adequate numbers of beans in a bean pool? How many beans are in use? Are there any clients waiting for a bean?
EJB Cache monitoring	Is the cache adequately sized or are there too many cache misses? What is the rate of EJB activations and passivations?
EJB Lock monitoring	Is there contention for locks? How many beans are locked? How many attempts have been made to acquire a lock for each bean?
JDBC Connection monitoring	Are all the JDBC pools available? Is each pool adequately sized? What are the peak usage times and values? How many connection leaks have occurred?
JDBC call monitoring	How many JDBC calls have been made? What was average response time of those calls? What are the queries that take a long time to execute?