Full stack monitoring for Oracle SOA suite.

Oracle SOA suite is a well used SOA server implementation in the industry. Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, standards-based software suite to build, deploy and manage integration following the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The components of the suite benefit from consistent tooling, a single deployment and management model, end-to-end security and unified metadata management.

Oracle SOA Suite helps businesses lower costs by allowing maximum re-use of existing IT investments and assets, regardless of the environment (OS, application server, etc.) they run in, or the technology they were built upon. It’s easy-to-use, re-use focused, unified application development tooling and end-to-end lifecycle management support further reduces development and maintenance cost and complexity.

One of the two minute tech tips, an Oracle OTN show by Bob Rhubart, is featuring Matt Brasier who makes a excellent point on monitoring Oracle SOA suite. You can view the show below:


Full Stack Monitoring
A good practice is to not monitor only SOA suite itself, monitoring the full stack will bring you the full value. Only monitoring the working and performance of SOA suite will only give you a hint of what might be wrong and where an issue might reside. Also, by only monitoring Oracle SOA Suite you will also be less able to predict issues before they happen.

Instead of "only" monitoring SOA Suite you should monitor the full stack, this includes (among other things):

• Network
• Server hardware
• Storage
• Oracle Linux Operating System
• Weblogic Middleware
• JVM (Java Virtual Machine)
• Oracle SOA Suite (health)
• Oracle SOA Suite (Response times)
• Database connections / database pooling

Oracle Enterprise Manager
When you want to monitor your solution in a full stack mode and ensure you can provide the best services and uptime to your users you should consider how to implement monitoring in your organisation. As you are using Oracle SOA suite you will most likley have more Oracle components in your IT footprint, using Oracle Enterprise Manager base functionality plus additional packs where needed is then a logical decision.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM or EM) is a set of web-based tools aimed at managing software and hardware produced by Oracle Corporation as well as by some non-Oracle entities.

Deploying Oracle Enterprise Manager will bring you exactly what is needed for a full stack and end-to-end monitoring, alerting and maintenance solution. As it is developed by Oracle it will by nature be able to communicate in an optimal way with the Oracle products, this includes not only SOA suite and the Oracle Database, this also includes the operating system Oracle Linux for example and extends also to the Oracle hardware and the network.

Conclusion
When you want to provide optimal monitoring and maintenance to your Oracle SOA suite implementation it is best practice to monitor the full technology stack. The solution provided by Oracle is Oracle Enterprise Manager which provides a lot of free to use features and can be extended with custom checks or additional packs when needed.