Best Practices for Managing and Monitoring WebSphere Message Broker

June 25, 2013Amir Gabrieli, Vice President of Solution Engineering, Correlsense

1. WMB’s role today2. Challenges to managing WMB3. Best practices 4. Correlsense approach5. Summary and Q&A

Agenda

Housekeeping

• Presentation will last 45 minutes• Submit questions via the chat window• Slides will be made available tomorrow

Featured Speaker

Amir GabrieliVP, Solution EngineeringCorrelsense

WMB’S ROLE IN TODAY’S COMPLEX SOLUTIONS

Market Example: Rede D’Or São Luiz

• Largest private hospital network in Brazil with 27 hospitals and 25,000 employees

• Needed to integrate multiple systems and ensure easy access to information

• Uses WMB to:– Automate communication between operational units

– Exchange information between hospitals and with backend operations

– Handle a high volume of information

Case study from IBM: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/KPES-97JPWS?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us

CHALLENGES AROUND MANAGING WMB-BASED SOLUTIONS

Managing WMB in Production is Challenging

• WMB comes with inherent challenges– Acts as a hub for business critical transactions

– Mediates between services and protocols

• Risks include:– Losing critical business transactions

– Failing critical business transactions

– General outages

– Poor performance of Flows and transactions

The Challenges

• Organizational• Change Management • Transactions Accountability • Production Monitoring

Organizational Challenge

• Different owners … one business service • Often the WMB developer sits in a different

department from the application owner• Message Flow “code” is not always under the

application owner’s control

Organizational Risks/Challenge

• Message Flow code is prone to logical errors • May result in unexpected/unsupported

transaction flows • Message Flows are more complicated than

assumed• Not enough QA/ testing invested for new Message

Flows

Change Management Challenge

• Making and deploying changes in Message Flows is easy … too easy– Dependencies with event sources, event consumers and

other services are not always obvious

– Hard to determine which components will be affected by a change

Change Management Risks/Challenge

• Small/last-minute changes may cause flow incompatibilities

• Often the test cycles for Message Flows are not well defined

Transactions Accountability

• Making sure each transaction is successful and having the ability to explain why other transactions fail

• Risks/challenges:– Typically you won’t be alerted to lost transactions and

Message Flows

– These may result in lost revenue and complications with business partners

Monitoring Challenge

• Existing monitoring solutions provide limited coverage

• WMB’s internal monitoring and standard solutions do not effectively address these challenges– Most focus on WMB and MQ performance

– Do not directly monitor the run-time execution of flows

– Or the interdependencies in the environment

Monitoring Risks/Challenge

• Long and complex troubleshooting sessions• Less control over the environment and solution

BEST PRACTICES APPROACH TO MANAGING AND MONITORING WMB-BASED APPLICATIONS

1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking

• Production issues are unavoidable– Provide and use better tracking and logging functionality

• Why?– Easier to track and

troubleshoot in production

– Provides a clear understanding

1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking

AddToInventory

AddToInventory_SOAPInput

InventoryServices

FindInventory_SetFunctionName

Reply_To_Queue

SetMQProperties

SetExpressionToLocalEnvironment

GetInventoryAvailabilityToFindInventoryInput_Transformation

Trace_GetInventoryAvailabilityToFindInventoryInput

SetMQProperties

JMS MQ Transform

SetSOAPReplyIdToJMSCorrelID

JMS Output

Example:• Log when Message Flow start/end/failed• Log when Message Nodes start/end/fail

1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking

Example: • Log which

messages were received/sent

• Log which queues are involved

1. Write Logs for Easy Back-Tracking

Example: • Capture errors

2. Keep Message Flows Lean

• Experienced WMB users tend to keep their Message Flows lean

• Why?– Message Flow syntax can get complicated and hard to

maintain

– Keeping simple Message Flows makes WMB easier to maintain and reuse

3. Keep Logic in the Apps

• Complex logic associated with Message Flows should be pushed to the application components

• Avoid developing complex logic within the flow

• Why?– Keep your Message Flows lean

– Keep your applications decoupled

– Complex validation tests and logic are easier to develop in programming languages

4. Manage the Inter-Dependencies

• Track and manage interdependency mapping between WMB, Message Flow, services and applications

• Why?– Understand who is impacted by changes

– Understand who is impacted by problems

– Increase control over the solution

4. Manage the Inter-Dependencies

Example: • Interdependency between applications, Web-Services, and other

services using WMB

5. No Code Changes in Production

• Changes should never be executed directly on the production environment

• They should be made on a test environment and then moved to production after approval

• Why?– Ensure all changes in production are controlled and

verified by QA

6. Manage Transaction Accountability

• Errors and unexpected flow behaviors will result in lost messages– For business critical solutions, this could cause lost

revenue or complications with partners

• Each transaction should be tracked and audited through the entire IT stack and WMB flows

• Why?– Audit for historical review

– Ensure the application owner can quickly find and handle lost messages and errors

6. Manage Transaction Accountability

6. Manage Transaction Accountability

7. Have Proper Monitoring Solutions

• You need to monitor:– WMB

– MQ

– Message Flows

– Business Transactions

• Why?– WMB-based solutions have many weak spots

– Ensure smooth operation and fast reaction to issues

CORRELSENSE APPROACH

SharePath for WMB

• Correlsense SharePath is an enterprise scale transaction centric application management and monitoring solution

• SharePath uses a unique monitoring technology for comprehensive monitoring of WMB-based applications

SharePath WMB Agent

• Complete visibility into WMB Message Flow processing

OS

Core Collector

Execution Group Process

(DataFlowEngine)

WMB Flows/Nodes

WMB Collector

Captures Message Flow

and Message Flow

Node

activity

Captures TCP/IP activity –

incoming and outgoing requests

for a wide range of protocols –

the interaction of WMB with all

other servers

MQ ClientMQ Collector

Captures shared-mem

ory MQ

Activity (Message IDs, queues, etc)

EXAMPLES

Real Time Tracing and Monitoring ofMessage Flows

Deep Dive for WMB Flows

• Log which SQLs and other API calls were called by nodes

Find (Lost) Transactions and Message Flows

Transaction Auto-Detection, Dependency and Topology Mapping

Load and Volume Trending

By Message Flow By Execution Group / Process

By Node (Message Flow Step)

Summary

• WMB is a market leader service bus solution

• Like other service buses it has inherent monitoring challenges

• Best practices and appropriate monitoring solutions are critical

Questions?

More information:info@correlsense.comwww.correlsense.com