This blog post was written by Johannes Michler (Chief Technology Officer (CTO) @ Broadpin & Oracle Ace Director).
At the beginning of March, Oracle released the OCI “edition” of an Application Performance Monitoring Service (APM). The service is even available free of charge for smaller applications (up to 1,000 Events per hour).
In the context of an Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade project and testing associated with this upgrade, I decided to take a closer look at the service.
There is a potential risk for confusion between the installation guide of the new service and the old service, that has dedicated guidance on how to install in an E-Business Environment.
Combining the two guides gives a good guidance on how to enable the new APM Java Agent for an E-Business Suite 12.2.10 environment:
1. Create a new (free) APM Domain in the OCI Console:
2. Download the APM Agent in the “Resources” section to the E-Business Suite (primary) Application Server.
3. Install the APM Agent (you can get the private data key as well as the endpoint from the Administration Section in the OCI Console):
java -jar apm-java-agent-installer-1.0.1389.jar provision-agent -service-name=upg2app -destination=/u01/install/APPS/fs_ne -private-data-key=XXXXXYYYY -data-upload-endpoint=https://xxxx.apm-agt.eu-frankfurt-1.oci.oraclecloud.com
4. Open the Weblogic Administration Console of the E-Business Suite environment and add -javaagent:/u01/install/APPS/fs_ne/oracle-apm-agent/bootstrap/ApmAgent.jar to each Managed Server that you want to monitor:
5. Bounce the E-Business Suite Environment
At startup, the APM Agent of each managed server is registered and displayed in the OCI Console for Application Performance Monitoring:
Apart from this overview dashboard, there is also a “Trace Explorer” that shows all the requests executed. You can easily drill down into individual HTTP sessions/requests and see in detail what has happened all the way down to the database:
The tooling furthermore provides the ability to embed a client side agent into the HTML pages run by the end user and thus allows end-to-end-monitoring of user sessions. Here it is described how to modify the web application; The procedure described in this (new) document can be combined with the E-Business Suite specific procedures described here.
The roadmap suggests that this will no longer be required in a future version of APM and that the user will be able to enable End-to-End-Monitoring by simply enabling it for the Agent.
The tool (to a limited extent even free) allows comprehensive End-To-End Monitoring of an Oracle E-Business Suite environment. The End-To-End User-Tracking easily allows correlating performance glitches reported by users with the details encountered on both the application server and the database.
