WebSphere Message Broker serves as a transactional backbone for many IT organizations yet introduces complexity around integrating, managing and monitoring messaging-based solutions. This results in lost message flows and stalled transactions. Join Correlsense for an online seminar which teaches holistic management and monitoring solutions for gaining visibility into and taking control of WMB. We discuss:
-How to identify key implementation and management challenges for WMB 6, 7 or 8
-A new approach to locating stalled transactions, understanding application dependencies and monitoring message flows
-Real world case studies and a live demo that illustrate ways to gain deeper visibility into your WebSphere Message Broker
Best Practices for Managing and Monitoring WebSphere Message Broker
1. Best Practices for Managing and
Monitoring WebSphere Message
Broker
June 25, 2013
Amir Gabrieli,
Vice President of Solution Engineering,
Correlsense
2. 1. WMB’s role today
2. Challenges to managing WMB
3. Best practices
4. Correlsense approach
5. Summary and Q&A
Agenda
6. 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
8. 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
10. 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
11. 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
12. 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
13. Change Management Risks/Challenge
• Small/last-minute changes may cause flow
incompatibilities
• Often the test cycles for Message Flows are not
well defined
14. 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
15. 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
18. 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
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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
25. 4. Manage the Inter-Dependencies
Example:
• Interdependency between applications, Web-Services, and other
services using WMB
26. 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
27. 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
30. 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
32. 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
33. SharePath WMB Agent
• Complete visibility into WMB Message Flow
processing
OS
Core Collector
Execution Group
Process
(DataFlowEngine)
WMB Flows/Nodes
WMB Collector
MQ Client
MQ Collector
39. Load and Volume Trending
By Message Flow By Execution Group /
Process
By Node
(Message Flow Step)
40. 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