Monday, June 23, 2008

Using a Low Privileged User to Monitor WebLogic from EM Grid Control

Most customers use the default weblogic user to manage WebLogic Server. However WebLogic Server provides role-based access control. You may be in a highly secured environment and you want to monitor your WebLogic Server domain with a low privileged user. EM Grid Control allows you to monitor WebLogic Servers with Monitors privilege.

You have to create a new user (Security realms -> myrealm->Users and Groups) using WebLogic Server Console and put the user in Monitors Group as shown below:



While discovering your WebLogic Server Domain, you can specify the low privileged username (dpanda in my case). Note that users in the Monitors Group do not have privileges to start/stop WebLogic Server instances and hence you will not be able to recycle managed servers from Grid Control.


You can verify the credentials used for your server by navigating to Monitoring Configuration for a managed WebLogic server as in the following figure. I used dpanda to discover my WLS domain





Hope this helps!

Managing WebLogic Server from Enterprise Manager Grid Control

WebLogic Server is now part of Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Family! If you use Enterprise Manager Grid Control in your organization to manage databases or Oracle Application Servers you can that to manage WebLogic Servers too. You can use EM Grid Control to seamlessly monitor and manage WebLogic with the similar, rich management functionality available for other Oracle products. You get the full benefit of the service dashboard, system dashboard, and topology views for environments that include WebLogic Server. This will also enable to manage your complete application infrastructure from a single management console.

Some of the key management features that Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides you are:

  • Multi-domain monitoring of WebLogic servers
  • Manage WebLogic Clusters as a single entity
  • Real-time and historical performance monitoring
  • Systems / Services Dashboard
  • End-user monitoring
  • Events Notification
  • Configuration Management and Tracking

In this blog, I will outline the steps required to discover/add a WebLogic Server Domain into Enterprise Manager Grid Control. In

Note that you can use EM to manage WebLogic versions 7.x thru 10.x. In my example, I’m using WebLogic Server version 10.1.

EM allows discovering of WebLogic Server Domains with a remote Oracle agent. So you can use an existing Oracle agent that you may have used to discover Oracle database or an application server. If you do not have an agent then you can install Oracle Agent on the host/machine where WebLogic Admin Server is running.

The agent needs access to WebLogic Client libraries to connect to the Admin Server using JMX. Hence you have to copy the WebLogic client libraries (weblogic.jar for WLS 7 and 8 and wlclient.jar and wljmxclient.jar for WLS 9 and 10) to the host/machine where Oracle Agent is running. If your agent is running on the same box where Oracle Agent is running then you have to do nothing.

In my case, the Oracle Agent is running on the same machine where WLS Admin Server is running.

In order to discover a new WebLogic Domain from Grid Control follow these steps:

1. Click on Targets -> Application Server Target -> Select WebLogic Application Sever from the Drop Down and Click on Add and you will get the following screen:





2. Enter the relevant info such as Host/machine Name where WebLogic Administration Server is running, admin port, WebLogic credentials. If the Oracle Agent is located in a remote server then you have to supply agent details and location where WebLogic Client libraries are located.

3. In the next page, you will be prompted to supply the host/machine credentials for the host where Oracle Agent is running. After supplying the host credentials and clicking Next, Enterprise Manager will discover the managed servers and clusters in the domain and you can select the servers/clusters that you want to manage/monitor from EM.



4. Finally you will be prompted to confirm your selection as in the following:




Once you confirm your selection, the WebLogic Domain with the servers and clusters will be discovered and you are good to go!