WebLogic Server: Logging the SOAP action in the access.log

WebLogic Server allows you to customize your access.log. This can be very powerful if you want to monitor for example service response times in a tool like Splunk (see here). When working with SOAP services though, especially those with many operations, it can be insufficient to monitor services to the level of the individual endpoint. You want to also know with which intent the endpoint is called. In this blog I will show how this can be achieved.

WebLogic Server: Automate obtaining performance metrics from DMS

Oracle provides the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) as part of WebLogic Server which is extremely useful if you want to obtain aggregated data of an environment in case of for example a performance test. The data which can be obtained from DMS is extensive. This varies from average duration of service calls to JVM garbage collects to datasource statistics. DMS can be queried with WLST.  See for example here. On example script based on this can be found here. You can also directly go to a web-interface such as: http://<host>:<port>/dms/Spy. The DMS Spy servlet is by default only enabled on development environments but can be deployed on production environments (see here).

Obtaining data from DMS in an automated fashion, even with the WLST support, can be a challenge. In this blog I provide a Python 2.7 script which allows you to get information from the DMS and dump it in a CSV file for further processing. The script first logs and uses the obtained session information to download information from a specific table in XML. This XML is converted to CSV. The code does not require an Oracle Home (it is not WLST based). The purpose here is to provide an easy to use starting point which can be expanded to suit specific use-cases. The script works against WebLogic 11g and 12c environments (has been tested against 11.1.1.7 and 12.2.1). Do mind that the example URL given in the script obtains performance data on webservice operations. This works great on composites but not on Service Bus or JAX-WS services. You can download a general script here (which requires minimal changes to use) and a (more specific) script with examples of how to preprocess data in the script here.

Overview of WebLogic RESTful Management Services

Inspired by a presentation given by Shukie Ganguly on the free Oracle Virtual Technology Summit in July (see here); "New APIs and Tools for Application Development in WebLogic 12c", I decided to take a look at an interesting new feature in WebLogic Server 12c: the RESTful Management Services. You can see here how to enable them. In this post I will provide an overview of my short study on the topic.

RESTful management services consist of two sets of resources. tenant-monitoring resources and 'wls' resources. The first is more flexible in response format (JSON, XML, HTML) and more suitable for monitoring. With the latter you can for example update datasource properties and create entire servers. It however only supports JSON as return format. The 'wls' resources also provide links so you can automagically traverse the resource tree which is very useful. I've provided a Python script to do just that at the end of this post.