Saturday, July 23, 2011

wlstonweb - An Innovative Tool for WebLogic Scripting

This blog was originally posted on http://blogs.oracle.com/jamesbayer when I worked for Oracle.

Antonio De Juan from Oracle Support introduced me to a very innovative web application he built and put on www.samplecode.oracle.com called wlstonweb.  This cool web application has 2 primary features.
1) Interactive WLST Sessions via a web browser
2) WLST Script Management via a web browser
The interactive WLST session via a web interface is surprisingly almost equivalent to using WLST from a shell because it leverages AJAX and
JQuery
Prototype.  The obvious benefit is, you can do everything that WLST exposes all from a web interface, which means that if you're on a mobile device, using someone else's computer, traveling, etc you have a lot of Administrative and Operation capabilities available even though you may not have a terminal handy.

The WLST Script management features allows you to organize your WLST scripts on the file system in a catalog as well as create, edit, and run the scripts directly from the web interface.  This is a great way to share WLST scripts that are used often among different parts of an organization and build up a catalog of scripts.

I created a brief recording showcasing wlstonweb. I encourage you to watch it in 720p so the recording isn't blurry.  Check it out and contact Antonio via the samplecode site if you have comments or suggestions.  The sampelcode UI can be difficult to navigate for new users, so go to the wlstonweb project home page -> File Releases -> war file -> prototype -> wlstonweb.war to download it . Nice work Antonio!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Create WebLogic Diagnostic Image With Metric Thresholds

This blog was originally posted on http://blogs.oracle.com/jamesbayer when I worked for Oracle.

My colleague Jeff West pointed me to Stack Overflow today where someone had a question about how to take a thread dump when a certain condition was present.  In their case, they are trying to troubleshoot a low thread count.  Their monitoring tools were missing the critical time window and by the time the thread dump was taken, the threads had recovered.  I thought this would be a great opportunity to see if a Diagnostic Image would contain a thread dump (yes it does), and whether I could automatically set WebLogic to create the Diagnostic Image easily when this condition was present (yes it is).  Below is the image illustrating the issue they were trying to solve.

Check out this recording if you want to know more about triggering actions when certain conditions are met automatically with WebLogic Server.  I show a WebLogic Diagnostic Framework (WLDF) System Module, configure a Notification and a Watch based on a JMX metric threshold.  The Watch has with an Alarm with a manual reset (via JMX/WLST) so that the Watch will not fire again until I reset it although you can also choose not to have Alarms or have them reset automatically after a time period. 

I encourage you to watch this video in 720p mode or higher for clarity.  You can change that using the menu at the bottom right video widget.  It will not display correctly in this blog template when using 720p mode.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

WebLogic Server Work Manager Demo Recording and Slides

This blog was originally posted on http://blogs.oracle.com/jamesbayer when I worked for Oracle.

I have previously blogged about WebLogic Server Work Managers and this simple demo before. Now there is a corresponding set of slides and a recording on the youtube.com/OracleWebLogic channel to accompany it. The slides also contain some additional detail not covered in the original example around stuck threads.
I was asked about this feature recently when someone needed to know how you could limit the number of requests serviced by WebLogic Server to match and not exceed the number of datasource connections configured. It's very straight-forward to make this happen with a work manager. The video is much more clear if you use the menu in the bottom right to render it in 720p. Unfortunately, the current blog template does not allow a width compatible with this video in youtube HD so it might be easier to use the link if it's not rendering well for you.