WebLogic Diagnostic Framework: Using WLDF through Practical Examples and Profiles (Oracle In-Focus) (Volume 51)

WebLogic is a complex, professional application server environment with a complex and powerful security environment. WebLogic server at its core implements the J2EE specification stack and its main purpose is to offer a hosting environment for J2EE applications. But WebLogic is much more than that. Like most professional J2EE server WebLogic also offers a large number of extended features like comprehensive management, clustering and failover functionality on different levels, plus a number of extended enterprise features not required by J2EE but very useful in the enterprise world, enterprise features that are required by many companies.

Have you ever tried to monitor a complex environment like a WebLogic domain with all its subsystems ?  The WebLogic runtime MBeanServer offers thousands of MBeans, depending on the amount of configured services, servers and applications. And what about analyzing a problem situation? The second topic is even worse because it is always difficult to determine the right level of details to be collected in order to have enough data for problem analysis and the impact these collections have on the overall performance.  What about activating data collectors just in case the system is in a problematic state?  Usually the collectors and parameters are set at startup time.

Well WebLogic offers an integrated solution to that. The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework (WLDF) offers a large number of subsystems and components which can be used to collect data, analyze data, create metrics and much more.  These collectors and be added or activated at any time during the server lifecycle without restarting the server. Even own application code can be instrumented so that monitoring data can be collected.

Oracle has a comprehensive documentation on WLDF but is looks like that the complexity of WLDF is scaring a lot of potential users. This book does not want to replace the Oracle documentation at all. This book wants to use a pragmatic and practical approach. After an introduction to WLDF and the different components and structures, this book discusses the notion of so called profiles with many practical examples. Based on these examples the reader should be able to start quickly with on WLDF diagnostic activities.  This book wants to enable users to easily understand WLDF using the WebConsole, WLST or JMX and most important break the complexity of WLDF in small pieces and easy to understand examples.