BAM: Capabilities & Applicability (Part 2)

BAM Architecture in General

Architectural diagram on figure below shows general architecture of BAM solution and explain functions of each of them.


Modeling tool

Usually GUI based toolkit is used to define monitor model. The model contains definition of events that should be “caught”, metrics, triggers and KPIs. Finished model is deployed and monitoring can start.


BAM core

This is the main component of BAM solution. It generates event patterns according to the monitor model and deploys them on CEP (Complex Event Processing) engine. It later processes the received event data and transforms them in the desired form. BAM core can also communicate with the Process engine, start and stop the processes, generate events etc. according to triggers and alarms defined in the monitor model.


CEP engine

This is the lowest level component responsible for event filtering. The CEP engine receives query patterns from the BAM core. It queries the event flow both from the Process engine and ESB and sends the “wanted” events back to BAM core. Usually only process engine events are used for BAM, but CEP engine allows also filtering of ESB flow events. That can be used in more technical oriented monitoring, or combined with the business data, to monitor performance, resources usage etc.


Front-end

Front-end receives data already processed, with computed KPIs etc. and takes care of their visualization. Every BAM solution should deliver graphical front-end witch rich visualization possibilities, such as charts, dashboards or graphs. An advanced OLAP-like visualization tool can be also useful. One of the advanced features some front-ends also provide is a real-time view of processes, visualized on process graph. Here you can view process diagram as it was modeled and track the state of a particular process instance. It is also common that at least one front-end should be web based. In this case front-end should provide a possibility to assemble your dashboards “on fly”. This is done usually by AJAX based scripts. AJAX becomes a standard for web-based BI tools today and it is also supported by Jasper Dashboards, one of the hot candidates for open source BAM front-end.


Long term data mining BI tools

An optional component that can analyze data from long-term perspective, realize data mining and knowledge discovery processes. Discovered information is delivered back to BAM core. Mostly external tools are used for such cases nowadays but hopefully in future some of those tools will become a part of BAM solutions. That will allow the feedback obtained by those tools to be sent back to the bam core or the process server.

General architecture for BAM

Where to Apply BAM

A business process typically spreads across multiple large systems which in turn made up of subsystems and components. For example, an order (i.e. a business entity) for a broadband connection flows from one system to another. It goes through some level of transformation while getting processed. The figure 1 shows how an order flows among multiple systems such as CRM, Billing and Inventory etc. to fulfill an order in a typical business process.
Once the order for the broadband connection is placed by the customer online, it flows through different systems on the way to get fulfilled. The basic steps followed in the process above are:

• The order must be validated online for availability and geographical access.
• A broadband router must be shipped from the warehouse to the customer’s address.
• Customer’s phone line and broadband connection must be linked to the same billing account.
• CRM should be updated with the order fulfillment information for the call center to access when providing support to the customer.
The fault with this setup is that each of the systems is autonomous. They have their own alerting and reporting mechanism. This might lead to a scenario where the customer experiences problems with - the delivery of the broadband router in time, unable to receive a discount (if associated) on the combination of a broadband and a land line. Due to the absence of a proper BAM solution the service provider won’t be able to sense these faults before the customers do, causing an unwanted blot in the customer relationship.

In an opposite scenario with a BAM implemented on the service provider’s side:


• The data from not only the systems involved in the business process but also the related subsystems and components can be captured proactively.
• The collected data can be tracked and analyzed against the defined measures.
• Alerts can be raised to the applications and the people when something is not behaving as desired.

How to Employ BAM

To be able to employ a BAM solution effectively the preferred option is to put the entire business process under the supervision of a BPM engine as shown in the figure below.

Business processes executed by BPM

 

This setup can be extended to incorporate a BAM solution as shown in figure below. Under this situation, the BAM adapter is integrated with the BPM engine that in turn is integrated with all the business process systems. The BAM adapter traces the business entity through the business process and keeps comparing it against the standard or defined values. Let us set a KPI for efficient delivery in the abovementioned example, such that an order should not rest within the inventory system more than seven hours. To handle this situation the BAM adapter should track all the orders that go to the inventory management system. If it does not receive a status change notification within seven hours, an email or an SMS alert is sent to the system owner. In case an API (application programming interface) is available to interact with the inventory system, the specific order can be identified and the owner can be notified with an alert on the same. If there is no status change noticed within twenty four hours, an alert (email or SMS) can be sent to the customer with an updated date of delivery.

BAM integrated with BPM infrastructure

This way, BAM brings in agility and resilience in the business, not only that, it can also cut down the burden on the support services by proactively notifying the customers about their order status.

Enterprises that use middleware instead of a BPM infrastructure for business process orchestration can also incorporate the BAM support in their existing setup using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and a logging framework.

In this case, the applications that cater to the part of the business process will require using a BAM logging framework for updating the status of the business entity (e.g. order) through its lifecycle. Multiple instances of this logging framework can be deployed throughout the enterprise and all of them can forward the logging calls to the BAM engine through the use of an ESB or an asynchronous messaging service.

BAM incorporated in a setup with middleware but no BPM

The BAM engine can revive the lifecycle trail of the business entity from these logged messages, trace its progress and raise alerts, alarms and communications as appropriate.

BAM: Capabilities & Applicability (Part 1)

Nowadays BAM (Business activity monitoring) is catching up like a mandate for the administration and management for an enterprise. There are few topics that discussed in this article explaining the capability and applicability of a BAM system. The references to the telecom IT sector has been used due to my current involvement in telecom industry.

Proactive data mining

Like other industry verticals the telecom sector depends on the execution of complex business processes. Usually business processes include interactions among multiple heterogeneous IT systems and human resources. The efficiency and success of these business processes in an operational environment can be monitored based on multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the business such as customer satisfaction, overall business performance and adaptability to changes. As a reason it is becoming important to monitor the performance of the business processes and optimize them based on the results. Presently businesses come to know about a problem when a failure occurs in the business processes. Monitoring is one of the best ways to sense an imminent problem and avoid it with corrective actions in advance so that, the impact on business and the users can be minimized.
This article will try to present a solution to monitor and optimize the business processes based on the currently available technologies and their maturity.

Purpose of Business Activity Monitoring

The term business activity monitoring was introduced by Gartner, Inc. in 2001 as their notion of aggregation, analysis, and real-time presentation functionality of business relevant information. The main objective of business activity monitoring is to predict or sense the upcoming problem based on the operational transactions and report the same for a preventive measure.

It is becoming increasingly significant in today’s enterprises to consider informed decisions in timely manner by consolidating information present in various silo data sources. These decisions eventually have major impact on the business parameters such as profitability, revenue, customer satisfaction and agility. IT systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Order Management System (OMS), Business Process Management (BPM), etc. have served with considerable efficiencies in their own areas of the business. However mostly the business processes span across multiple systems.
If we imagine of an enterprise with the capability of foreseeing the next steps, predicting impact of events, sensing an unseen fault by putting two and two together from different systems and eventually spot and plug any hole in the plumbing before the damage is done, a tremendous agility, resilience and efficiency in the business processes can be introduced.
A layer that is able to monitor business processes in the above mentioned manner should be able to understand and perform real time monitoring of vital signs in the context of business process. This monitoring should be made proactive as much as possible. Apart from the failures, the deviations in the normal trends based on the historical data need to be flagged and alerted to appropriate stakeholders with minimum time lag. Among the on-demand features, it should have ad hoc reports, dashboards for the decision making community within the enterprise. Such a layer would bring in manifold benefits.
For example, let’s consider an e-commerce scenario with the key business process of fulfillment of orders placed online. The customer places an order with a set of items and gets notified with a date of delivery. Under a happy path scenario, the customer receives the items on the promised date. Considering a variation when the logistics of delivery such as trucks, delivery boys etc. are operating at the full capacity due to a sudden increase in the number orders placed in, an individual order might get delayed in the delivery. The activity monitoring layer could potentially correlate the high volumes being handled by the system to a potential delay in delivery times. This can trigger an alert or communication to customers informing them about the delay before it actually takes place.
Imagine a more interesting scenario of inventory management for the e-commerce site. Assuming that there is a forecast for thunderstorms for couple of days in some of the areas, the monitoring layer can send an alert to the inventory management group to stock up on rainy weather essentials such as umbrellas and raincoats to enable the business to meet the un-foreseen increased demand.


Components of a Business Activity Monitoring

BAM consists of the following generic components:

Business Event

A business event points to the occurrence of an event that is significant to an operation of a business activity. It is separate from an IT event. An IT event usually shows the occurrence of an event in the context of an IT resource.

Business activity

A business activity offers services or functionalities required to serve a specific business purpose.

Metric

A metric is a measurement of a specific property belonging to business activity that can be used to monitor business operations.

Key performance indicator

KPIs are the metrics used to measure the progress of a business goal. KPIs have to be measurable as well as achievable and provide the possibility to aggregate measures over a set of instances. In order to define KPIs, companies should have clear performance requirements, and they must also have a clear definition of their strategic target which can be compared to runtime values.

Techniques of Today

Though BAM is relatively a new term are some techniques that have been around for a while. The stalwarts amongst these are

• IT system monitors
• Business Intelligence (BI)
• Reporting and Analytics
• Business Process Management (BPM)

Each of the above has its own pros and cons when the BAM features are evaluated. Let us dig a little deeper in these three techniques.


IT System Monitors: To be able to monitor failures and success events at times many enterprises have implemented IT system monitoring measures in effective ways. The main objective of such systems is to alert the support services in a timely manner to meet the service level of agreement and availability levels of the application. This technique targets individual applications for monitoring and helps them to react under a error condition at the application level. While it does not consider the entire business process as a monitoring target as a result it is unable to track any fault at the business process level. IT system monitors are mostly reactive than proactive. They keep watching the applications, logs, network, server, hardware in isolation for faults rather than the end-to-end business process. IT system monitors will be unable to detect an error at the business process level while the applications are running smoothly. IT system monitors watch for the malfunctions and failures only, while an ideal BAM should look for success and failures both to yield meaningful activity metrics. They are also not aware of the business process level KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
For example, if a customer is promised with the certain duration for an order fulfillment process, a KPI needs to be set at the business process level for order processing. IT system monitors are unable to detect a degradation of this kind of KPIs. The scope of alerts is limited to the application and does not correlate to failures in other participating application in the same process. It is also unable to detect any variation in the business process when the applications are functioning properly.
In spite of all shortcomings these tools have been serving as monitoring instruments for many organizations. In fact there have been conscious design efforts introduced to log success events (along with the failures) in individual applications’ logs against a unique correlation id and also a listener mechanism to poll the logs in a timely manner and correlate the events using the unique id for each business process transactions. However since the number of I/O operations increase (due to write in log and timely polling of listeners), the performance of the applications is compromised seriously under this situation.


Business Intelligence (BI): Business Intelligence has been occupying the place of a backbone for decision making process of the organizations for quite some time now. This is due to its capabilities of analytics and extensive reporting. BI is capable of processing enormous amount of data stored in huge data marts at predefined frequencies by using ETL (Extraction Transformation and Loading) tools and put the same into the data stores which gets reported eventually. This way BI enables businesses to make informed decisions to a great extent. However when it comes to BAM some constraints apply.

• Since BI and data warehousing are based on batch processes, proactive and real time decisions can not be made easily using BI.
• The statistical analysis is performed manually in BI. Since the monitoring framework is not updated with the historical trends, it’s not able to flag events which are deviating from the normal trend.
• Since BI is not a real time system, it can not track real time errors or deviations and generate alerts for that.

Business Process Management (BPM): Enterprises use business process management to manage, model and automate business processes. Externalization of all business processes those are entrenched deeply in applications to a central location is one of the main tenets of using BPM. BPM accomplishes quite a lot from that angle in terms of improved process agility and centralized governance of vital processes. But BPM also has some shortcomings as a BAM solution:

• BPM has no built in monitoring capabilities. Therefore, alerts based on the success or failure of a process can not be generated by the BPM infrastructure. Furthermore the success and failures can not be evaluated against the historical trend to compose intelligent reports necessary for the right changes or decisions to the activities.
• BPM has the knowledge of a business process while it is lacking the knowledge of relationship between the participating applications, historical data and statistical analysis which are required for anticipating the unknown errors in a business process.

The table below presents a comparative analysis of the BAM techniques described above. It also shows the rating of the three techniques as an ideal BAM solution.

Table 1: Comparative analysis of three BAM techniques

MBT

Another trend is catching up along with WEB2.0, SOA and EA (Enterprise Architecture) which is Business transformation or IT transformation to be specific. I believe this is going to be the next big thing in IT industry. Most of the enterprises who piled up multiple big and small applications to support their daily business transactions are realizing a need to consolidate the pool of software applications to have a better control monitoring and governance. There is a burning need to control the growth of IT landscape. As a result the enterprises are going for transformation of their IT stack. I foIn search for a standard methodology of business transformation found most of the consulting farms have come up with proprietary methodologies. There is one called MBT (Methodology for Business Transformation - http://www.doi.gov/archive/ocio/architecture/mbt/guidance.htm) presented by the US Department of the Interior. This is in fact in line with some methodologies that I have been using for the last couple of months. This method considers the vital ingredients of EA and IT governance along with the technical aspect of process re-engineering and transformation roadmap. As TOGAF describes the ADM (Architecture Development Method), MBT plays an important role in listing out the important activities to be done on the way to transformation.

BAM: Now and Beyond

BAM is still not matured enough to be used smoothly in an enterprise. It requires the implementer to take more responsibilities to fit with the business in context. But the promises that BAM brings in is really very beneficial to all the industries and businesses. If implemented in a proper way that fits with the business strategies it can bridge the gap between the business and the technology. The enterprises those roll out BAM will have an obvious advantage over their competitors with respect to the performance of the business systems.
As far as the agility is concerned, the best option for an enterprise to get the maximum benefit out of a BAM solution is to have centralized control over the business processes using a BPM platform and complement the same by a BAM framework. BPM will help the enterprise to have an end-to-end view on the business processes and their control while BAM will bring in the capabilities to monitor the changes, foresee a variation from the normal trend and act accordingly.
The changes that can be monitored by a BAM could be anything that happens in the market but the real intelligence that can earn a greater profitability for a business. This can be done with a continuous mining of news feeds and analyzing them to find out which are relevant to the business and can potentially change the landscape of a business. This is how technology can be employed to watch for the business opportunities like a hawk and enrich the business to proceed toward a profitable growth, operational efficiency, reducing operational costs and adaptability. CEP is a brainier and improved BAM that tracks the real time business events and figure out a business pattern based on the same. In case of a deviation from the normal pattern the CEP notifies and enables systems to resolve issues automatically.

Way to effective SOA Governance: A case study

There are multiple issues faced by conventional IT companies on the way to implement effective SOA governance.

• Lack of decision on what services to be built and how to make them reusable and sharable leads to interoperability issues.
• No standard mechanism to reuse existing services.
• No mechanism to impose standards and policies on the services
• No control on service provisioning.
• Lack of management and visibility on dependencies

Traditional IT governance believes on ownership of IT assets. This model does not help in SOA paradigm. SOA leads to reusable shared packages of IT assets.
As an example, we can consider a fictitious telecom service provider company as SDFTELECOM. They have various departments looking after customer management, inventory management, billing, service provisioning and activation. Each department has their own stack of systems to serve their respective areas of operation. Let us consider a set of systems participate in an end-to-end order fulfillment process. The systems were moderately integrated using SOA infrastructure. As per the ownership model followed, the participating systems belong to different departments of SDFTELECOM. With significant growth in business and increasing customer demand the systems need to undergo changes quite often. But due to the individual ownership of systems they are facing challenges in managing their SOA landscape.
In most of the cases the changes are made on adhoc basis. Services introduced during these changes are often developed in silos. Overall, they are not reaching the intended business agility goals due to the following issues:

• There are significant issues with service reuse (or lack reuse).
• The company is struggling to identify new service candidates and to prioritize them.
• Governance of changes and versions for services is crude and unrefined.
• Lack of mechanism to enforce operational policies consistently across the SOA runtime environment.
• Adoption of standards is unsystematic.

SDFTELECOM has identified three key requirements to be addressed to overcome the abovementioned issues.
Govern how new services are created.
Maximize the reuse existing services.
Enforce standards and best practices across SDFTELECOM SOA landscape.

To implement effective SOA governance SDFTELECOM needs to accomplish the following activities.

1. Setting up SOA vision and strategy in line with corporate and IT strategy.
2. Business service portfolio modeling
3. Services and implementation lifecycle
4. Setting service standards, policies and prioritization
5. Setting up a service funding strategy
6. Controlling changes
7. Aligning SOA strategy with Enterprise Architecture.
8. Managing Service inventory and registries

The organization structure of SDFTELECOM IT is shown as below.

IT organization structure of SDFTELECOM

The organization is headed by a Top level IT Steering Committee (TLITSC) led by the CIO. The domain owners within the TLITSC are accountable for the business functionality within their appropriate business domain. These domain owners direct reporting responsibilities within their business domain as well as to the CIO. The TLITSC has a panel of key technical members as well. The technical members along with the domain owners attempt to have a convergence between business and IT.
The organizational model has a layer of Business Domain Directors and SOA Direction team next to TLITSC. Domain owners in TLITSC receive insight on priorities in their respective domains from the business domain directors. The business domain directors also work with the SOA Direction team to give insight on required business functionality. The SOA Direction team is in command of defining and refining the strategy and direction for the SOA initiatives, high-level direction of the architecture, and proper guidance of the service portfolio in association with the Business Domain Directors.
Core SOA Team helps out the implementation of required services with the guidance of SOA Direction team. The role of Core SOA Team is to help in defining various processes throughout the service life cycle as well as standards and best practices to ensure that the processes are properly communicated, enforced, and evolved. Similar to other layers of the Center ofCompetency (SOACC), the SOA Core Team also has representation from both the business and IT perspectives.

Distribution of responsibilities among different teams of SDFTELECOM is shown in the table below.

Distribution of responsibilities among SDFTELECM IT teams

Supposing a new requirement for a new service to check customer’s credit rating is placed by the billing department. The decision flow on whether the service to be created or reused is depicted below. The activities are numbered with 1,1A, 2 etc.

Decision flow for service creation

The distribution of responsibilities (shown in the flow above) among the teams are given below.

Similarly to service creation, more decision flows can be created for improving the service reusability across the organization and enforcing of standards and best practices for the services.

MyApp on WebSphere Application Server v6.1 (ND): A case study (PART 2)

This is a continuation of Part 1 of the same series posted on 31st March 2010.
The application I wanted to install on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is packaged in MyApp.ear.

Installing WAS and Enterprise

Pick up the pieces

In my case I collected MyApp.ear, Linux.c88STML.tar.gz (installer for WebSphere Application Server 6.1 network deployment on Linux), downloaded.updii.61013.linux.ia32.zip (UpdateInstaller), 6.1.0-WS-PLG-LinuxX32-FP0000013.pak (Fix Pack 13), jconn2.jar on the box under installation.

Installing WAS6.1nd

1. Created a dir as /opt/was61nd_install and execute
# tar -zxvf Linux.c88STML.tar.gz -C ./was61nd_install
2. Executed /opt/was61nd_install/launchpad.sh
3. Accepted License Agreement.
4. GUI came up with a warning regarding the OS prerequisite check failed. I ignored and clicked on "next" button.
5. Accepted Sample Application Installation.
6. Selected Installation directory as /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer61nd. Click "next".
7. In "WebSphere Application Server Environment" selected "Cell" environment.
8. In "Enable Administration Security" screen, clicked on the check box "Enable Administration Security".
9. Entered user/password (I tried wasadmin/password) for Admin and entered password for Sample Application (mine is same as Admin).
10. It will come up with "Installation Summary". Clicked next to start installation.

Installing FixPack13

1. The FixPack13 needs the UpdateInstaller to be installed first. The UpdateInstaller for WAS610 can be found at http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg24012718.
2. The instructions for installing the UpdateInstaller are at
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.nd.doc/info/ae/ae/tins_updi_install.html
3. The FixPack13 for WAS61 on Linux is available at http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg24017311.
4. The instructions for installing the FixPack13 is available at http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg27010985#steps.
5. Unzipped "unzip download.updii.61013.linux.ia32.zip -d /opt/installers/was610nd/untar/UpdateInstaller/" under /opt/installers/was610nd/UpdateInstaller.
6. Used the installRegistryUtils command with the required attributes to examine installation locations for the installed Update Installer products. The command file is named as installRegistryUtils.sh in the app_server_root/bin directory.
7. Went to /opt/installers/was610nd/untar/UpdateInstaller/UpdateInstaller and opened "responsefile.updiinstaller.txt" in vi.
8. Set the option '-OPT silentInstallLicenseAcceptance="true"' and "-OPT installLocation=/opt/IBM/WebSphere/UpdateInstaller"(where the UpdateInstaller should be installed).
9. Executed "./install -silent -options ./responsefile.updiinstaller.txt".
10. Executed cp /opt/installers/was610nd/FixPack13/6.1.0-WS-WAS-LinuxX32-FP0000013.pak /opt/IBM/WebSphere/UpdateInstaller/maintenance/.
11. Opened /opt/IBM/WebSphere/UpdateInstaller/responsefiles/install.txt in vi.
12. Uncommented and set '-W maintenance.package="/opt/IBM/WebSphere/UpdateInstaller/maintenance"' (the location where the FixPack13 is residing).
13. Set '-W product.location="/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer61nd"' (where WAS is installed), saved install.txt.
14. Stopped all WebSphere related processes as below.
a) Went to Admin Console -> System administration -> Nodes. (Figure 2)
The Admin Console URL is https://10.15.2.19:9043/ibm/console ,the port might vary to 9044.
b) Checked localhostNode01 and clicked Stop.
c) Went back to Putty session and moved into AppServer61nd/profiles/Dmgr01/bin.
d) Executed "./stopManager.sh -username wasadmin -password password".

Figure 2

15. Executed /opt/IBM/WebSphere/UpdateInstaller/update.sh -options ./responsefiles/install.txt -silent.
16. Started up AppServer61nd/profiles/Dmgr01/bin/startManager.sh -username wasadmin -password password.
17. Started up AppServer61nd/profiles/AppSrv01/bin/startNode.sh -username wasadmin -password password.
18. Opened Admin Console on the browser (https://10.15.2.19:9043/ibm/console).
19. Went to Servers->Application Servers and started server1. (Figure 3)
20. Went to Applications -> Enterprise Applications and checked if SampleGallery has been started already, if not, it has to be started.
21. Went to Servers->Application Servers and created 1 more server as server2 (in addition to the existing one - server1) under the same node. Selected server type as "default". Opted for WebSphere to generate the ports for all servers.
22. Once server2 was created, clicked on Save link on the following page and synchronized the Node under System Administration -> Nodes.
23. Tried starting Servers -> Application Servers -> server2 to see if it's ok.
24. Stopped all the servers from the Admin Console for further configuration changes.

Figure 3

Installing MyApp

1. Went to Applications -> Enterprise Applications. Clicked Install button on the right panel. (Figure 4)
2. Browsed to the path to MyApp.ear and select the path to it and clicked next.
3. Clicked Finish on the Summary page.
4. After seeing "Application MyApp installed successfully.” Clicked on "Save" link.

Figure 4

Configuring MyApp

1. Placed jconn2.jar (I used Sysbase database for MyApp and jconn2.jar was containing the JDBC drivers for Sybase) under AppServer61nd/optionalLibraries/sybase.
2. Went to Security -> Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure. (Figure 5)

Figure 5

3. Expanded the link "Java Authentication and Authorization Service" and clicked on "J2C authentication data". (Figure 6)

Figure 6

4. Clicked on New button to add.
5. Entered Alias as "MyDBAdmin", entered user and password, clicked apply.
6. On next page clicked "Save" link.
7. Went to Resources -> JDBC -> JDBC Providers.
8. On "JDBC providers" screen on the right selected the scope as localhostNode01.server2 from the dropdown list. (Figure 7)

Figure 7

9. Clicked New to add a JDBC provider.
10. On next page selected "sybase" as the database type, "Sybase JDBC 2 driver" as the provider type and "connection pool data source" as the implementation type. Accepted provider name same as the provider type, i.e. "Sybase JDBC 2 driver". Clicked next. (Figure 8)

Figure 8

11. Entered AppServer61nd/optionalLibraries/sybase as the path to the jconn2.jar. (Figure 9)

Figure 9

12. Clicked finish button on the summary page. Clicked on "Save" directly to the master configuration.
13. Went to Resources -> JDBC -> JDBC Provider.
14. Clicked on "Sybase JDBC 2 driver" link on the right.
15. Clicked on "Data Sources" (under Additional Properties) link on the next page. (Figure 10)

Figure 10

16. Clicked on New button to create a new data source under this provider. (Figure 11)

Figure 11

17. Entered "MyDS" as the data source name, "jdbc/MyDS" as the JNDI name and selected “DBAdmin" from the J2C authentication alias list. Clicked next. (Figure 12)

Figure 12

18. On next page (entered database specific properties for the data source), entered database name as MYDB, server name and port, clicked next.
19. On the next page (i.e. summary) clicked finish. Clicked Save on the following page.
20. Selected "MyDS" from the list and clicked on "Test Connection". In case a warning is displayed on top of page click on the "Synchronize" link in the warning message. Don't forget to click the checkbox for across node synchronization.
21. With this I went to Servers->Application Servers and restarted server2 and my application is ready to go :)

MyApp on WebSphere Application Server v6.1 (ND): A case study (PART 1)

It’s better late than never :) As I have promised to present a case study of installing an application in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) environment in my previous article “Multihomed J2EE Clustering: A Case Study”, here is one on WAS network deployment version.
In this post I will try put together a brief on WAS concepts and overview required to go ahead with the deployment plan.

WebSphere Application Server: An overview

WAS is the implementation by IBM of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. It conforms to the J2EE 1.4 specification.
WebSphere Application Server is available in three unique packages that are designed to meet a wide range of customer requirements.
_ IBM WebSphere Application Server - Express V6
_ IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 - Base
_ IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V6

Network deployment platform

We used Network deployment (ND) version for the installation described below.
With ND, a distributed server configuration can be set up, which enables

# central administration,
# workload management and
# failover.

In this environment, one or more application servers are integrated into a cell that is managed by a deployment manager. The application servers can reside on the same machine as the deployment manager or on multiple separate machines. Administration and management is handled centrally from the administration interfaces via the deployment manager. With this configuration, multiple application servers can be created to run unique sets of applications and then manage those applications from a central location. However, more importantly, one can cluster application servers to allow for workload management and failover capabilities. Applications that are installed in the cluster are replicated across the application servers. When one server fails, another server in the cluster continues processing. Workload is distributed among Web containers and Enterprise JavaBeans containers in a cluster using a weighted round-robin scheme. Figure 1 illustrates the basic components of an application server in a distributed server environment.

Application servers, nodes, and cells

Regardless of the configuration, the WebSphere Application Server is organized based on the concept of cells, nodes, and servers. While all of these elements are present in each configuration, cells and nodes do not play an important role until you take advantage of the features provided with Network Deployment.

Application servers

The application server is the primary runtime component in all configurations and is where an application actually executes. All WebSphere Application Server configurations can have one or more application servers. In the Express and Base configurations, each application server works as a separate entity. There is no workload distribution or common administration among application servers. With Network Deployment, a distributed server environment can be built consisting of multiple application servers maintained from a central administration point. In a distributed server environment, one can cluster application servers for workload distribution.

Nodes, node groups, and node agents

A node is a logical grouping of server processes that are managed by WebSphere and that share common configuration and operational control. A node is associated with one physical installation of WebSphere Application Server. In a stand-alone application server configuration, there is only one node. With Network Deployment, multiple nodes can be configured that can be managed from one common administration server. In these centralized management configurations, each node has a node agent that works with a deployment manager to manage administration processes.
A node group is a new concept introduced with WebSphere Application Server V6. A node group is a grouping of nodes within a cell that have similar capabilities. A node group validates that the node is capable of performing certain functions before allowing those functions. For example, a cluster cannot contain both z/OS nodes and nodes that are not z/OS. In this case, multiple node groups (one for the z/OS nodes and one for nodes other than z/OS) can be defined. A DefaultNodeGroup is automatically created based on the deployment manager platform. This node group contains the deployment manager and any new nodes with the same platform type.

Cells

A cell is a grouping of nodes into a single administrative domain. In the Base and Express configurations, a cell contains one node. That node may have multiple servers, but the configuration files for each server are stored and maintained individually.In a distributed server configuration, a cell can consist of multiple nodes which are all administered from a single point. The configuration and application files for all nodes in the cell are centralized into a cell master configuration repository.

Figure 1

Servers

WebSphere Application Server supplies application servers which provide the functions that are required to host applications. It also provides the ability to define external servers to the administration process.
In the next post (PART 2) of this series I will describe the installation process and strategy of MyApp on WAS.