Developers deploying applications to WebSphere Application Server (WAS) now have something to be "fired up" about. Candle Corporation, a systems management and business integration company, has packaged a powerful and intuitive performance monitoring tool called Omegamon XE for WebSphere Application Server, a potent tool for optimizing the performance and availability of WAS. Omegamon XE has brought some much-needed usability and functionality enhancements to performance monitoring software.

Remember that Omegamon XE server should be installed on the same machine as the WebSphere Application Server. The installation and configuration of Omegamon XE is not straightforward. Let's just say there were too many knobs to turn. Also, a licensing key must be obtained from Candle before installation is complete. The installer will prompt you for a trial key, which you can obtain from www.candle.com/www1/webspheretrial by completing a registration form. The key will be sent to you via e-mail and will enable the product for 30 days from the date you registered for it. There is a limit of five trial keys per company. (The company name is determined from the domain name in your e-mail address.)

After installation, there are no shortcuts on the desktop or under the start menu for accessing the help files and documentation. I would highly recommend reading the documentation provided on the installation CD. I found the product documentation in the following folder: "<CD Drive>:\DOCS\ PRODUCT\KWE101". After installation, I extracted two PDF files - "Getting Started Guide" and "User's Guide" - to my desktop. Once installation is complete, I would also recommend creating a new application instance just for testing and familiarization. Best guess - you will need it!

A new application instance is created by selecting "Create Instance" from the "Actions" dropdown menu in the "Manage Candle Services" window. You will be prompted to assign a name for the new instance and to configure its properties (see Figure 1). Double-clicking on any item in the "Parms" list of the "Configure Application Instance" window will launch a dialog box similar to the Windows registry key/value dialog box. You can modify values to match your application characteristics and requirements.

An instance can be easily removed by right-clicking on the instance name in the "Manage Candle Services" window. For testing purposes I used the PetStore sample application shipped with WAS.

Monitoring
Omegamon XE offers an enterprise-level GUI interface and the ability to customize workspaces that are tailored to your (customer's) desired views (see Figure 2). Workspaces can be customized for visually identifying potential application bottlenecks (not that your apps contain such things).

For those who have relied on IBM's performance monitoring tool, Resource Analyzer, shipped with WAS, one very noteworthy enhancement in Omegamon XE is that it uses less system resources for collecting and refreshing the Java Virtual Memory (JVM) statistics. Note that the JVM workspaces on Omegamon XE are blank initially, and therefore need to be populated by activating the JVM profiler. Information on how to activate this is located on page 61 of the "Getting Started Guide."

Omegamon XE uses a client/server architecture in which the server is the repository for all workspaces and related data. To reduce the overhead of collecting all JVM stats and refreshing workspace views at startup, several fields on the Workspace display are left blank. JVM stats can be collected and displayed by setting the instrumentation levels using the "WAS SetIL" Take Action commands in Omegamon XE. There is a section in the "Getting Started Guide" titled "Setting Instrumentation Levels to Collect Performance Data."

Omegamon XE's very intuitive design provides the ability to create customizable views and set thresholds for the JVM and related application server statistics, such as the ability to view database connection pooling stats, transaction commit rate, servlet request rate, and JVM memory usage from a single window. From this single window, you can pinpoint possible application bottlenecks and quickly identify potential memory leaks. A couple of usability features that should be immediately pleasing to Omegamon XE users are its single-window drill-down menu and user-friendly design. Most of the application defaults should be acceptable for small- to mid-range size mission-critical applications. Omegamon XE can be launched from a Web browser or executed as a standalone desktop application.

Alerts
Candle included a Visual Programming Module that lets system administrators define complex conditions that can be evaluated without requiring coding. By simply dragging and dropping icons, users can create alert rules for monitoring attributes such as performance, resource, and workload. But be aware that with this feature, you should know exactly what attributes are needed before setting alerts. It may take some trial and error to get this right.

I would not recommend using alerts for finding bottlenecks and locating possible application degradation points. You can build very complex alerts using correlations with AND/OR Boolean logic. However, alerts will not give you a correlated reason why application or system faults occur, e.g., memory leaks occurring because database connections are not being closed by a renegade session bean that is only loaded when a certain servlet method is called. The specified system administrator or user will receive alerts via e-mail or on the server desktop when a predefined (Omegamon XE) or user-defined threshold has been exceeded.

System administrators can also specify a set of predetermined routines to be executed at regular intervals. These routines or tasks can be executed without requiring the presence of a system administrator or user.

Conclusion
There is light at the end of the tunnel! Candle's Omegamon XE gives IT departments a much-needed tool for taming mission-critical and resource-intensive applications. Web-based applications are prone to slowdowns and are very difficult to debug. Omegamon XE can help you locate performance degraders such as ghost database connections, creation and removal of EJBs and servlets, and unexpectedly large object pools. This product is an excellent choice for WebSphere architects.

SIDEBAR
Omegamon XE
Company Info:
Candle Corporation
201 N. Douglas St.
El Segundo, CA 90245
E-mail: webspheretrial@candle.com
Web: www.candle.com
Telephone: 310-535-3600
Fax: 310-727-4287

Test ENVIRONMENT:
Win 2000 (SP2) machine running WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition 4.01

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Omegamon XE Platform Coverage
OMEGAMON XE for WebSphere Application Server is available on AIX, Sun Solaris, NT/Windows 2000, and OS/390.

OMEGAMON XE supports WAS Advanced Edition versions 3.5.x and 4.0.x, and WAS Enterprise Edition v3.6 on the distributed platforms mentioned above.

OMEGAMON XE for WebSphere Application Server for OS/390 supports 4.0.x on the mainframe. However, the following editions are not supported:

• Figure 1
• Figure 2