Monitoring a WebLogic Domain

You should give serious consideration to monitoring a WebLogic domain in a production environment. Here's a summary of the various options available to you:

• You can use the Administration Console to actively monitor the domain. The Administration Console provides exhaustive monitoring information about virtually all aspects of the domain. For instance, you can use it to monitor the health of all servers and access their log files. In addition, you can use it to monitor other domain resources such as clusters, JDBC connection pools, and JMS destinations. Chapter 15 gives a good overview of how to monitor the various domain resources. Refer to individual chapters for additional material on monitoring that particular resource. For instance, Chapter 6 provides information on how to monitor both active and pending in-flight transactions.
• You can use the JMX framework, as described in Chapter 20, to access the same information as the Administration Console.
• You can use the logging framework to monitor the domain. This chapter described the various logs that are maintained by WebLogic: the domain logs, the server logs, and the log files created by the Node Manager for itself and for the servers under its control. In addition, you can access logs for different subsystems such as the HTTP server, JTA, and JDBC. You also can alter the logging behavior in a more proactive way, as described in Chapter 21. For example, you can write log listeners that actively notify you when a server's health fails.
• You can use the SNMP framework, as described in Chapter 22, to extend the monitoring capabilities that you may have in place already in order to include your WebLogic domain.