Analyzing instances in an Oracle SOA environment: linking composite instances via references

To analyse a running environment, it is useful to know which process calls which other process and how often it does so (which instance is initiated by which reference from which other process). This provides insight in how composites are linked and thus how process flows are implemented. In a previous post I've looked at Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM) to achieve this insight (http://javaoraclesoa.blogspot.nl/2013/11/a-first-look-at-oracle-business.html). Oracle BTM can't analyse local invocations and requires quite some work to install/setup correctly. Also a license is required, for example SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition, in order to use this product. To make monitoring composite instances and their relations possible without this product, the dehydration store, can be queried. In this post I'll describe a method on how this can be done. Mind that this method is not fully tested and certainly not supported by Oracle. Use with caution!

A first look at Oracle Business Transaction Management (BTM)

Monitoring and debugging Oracle SOA Suite environments is often a topic not paid much attention to. The people who write the software are often not much involved in the maintenance of the running software and the maintenance people do not have much application knowledge.

Usually Oracle SOA applications are composed of several components which interact with each other. These components are often of different technologies. Personally I tend to use databases, BPEL processes and Java Webservices a lot. For the maintenance people it is difficult to understand all application call chains and debug these in case of problems.

I was curious if the Oracle BTM product would provide a solution for this; http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/btm-496775.html. BTM is part of the SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition. It used to be a product from AmberPoint before Oracle bought them in 2010. I've used SOA Suite 11.1.1.7 with BTM 12.1.0.4.1 on an XE 11r2 Db for this tryout. I did not read much documentation about this product or followed any courses, so it would also be a test of intuitiveness.