Oracle Service Bus: Produce messages to a Kafka topic

Oracle Service Bus is a powerful tool to provide features like transformation, throttling, virtualization of messages coming from different sources. There is a (recently opensourced!) Kafka transport available for Oracle Service Bus (see here). Oracle Service Bus can thus be used to do all kinds of interesting things to messages coming from Kafka topics. You can then produce altered messages to other Kafka topics and create a decoupled processing chain. In this blog I provide an example on how to use Oracle Service Bus to produce messages to a Kafka topic.

Oracle Service Bus: Pipeline alerts in Splunk using SNMP traps

Oracle Service Bus provides a reporting activity called Alert. The OSB pipeline alerts use a persistent store. This store is file based. Changing the persistent store to JDBC based, does not cause pipeline alerts to be stored in a database instead of on disk. When the persistent store on disk becomes large, opening pipeline alerts in the Enterprise Manager (12c) or Service Bus console (11g) can suffer from poor performance. If you put an archive setting on pipeline alerts (see here), the space from the persistent store on disk is not reduced when alerts get deleted. You can compact the store to reduce space (see here), but this requires the store to be offline and this might require shutting down the Service Bus. This can be cumbersome to do often and is not good for your availability.

If you do not want to use the EM / SB console or have the issues with the filestore, there is an alternative. Pipeline alerts can produce SNMP traps. SNMP traps can be forwarded by a WebLogic SNMP Agent to an SNMP Manager. This manager can store the SNMP traps in a file and Splunk can monitor the file. Splunk makes searching alerts and visualizing them easy. In this blog I will describe the steps needed to get a minimal setup with SNMP traps going and how to see the pipeline alerts in Splunk.