Get notified when your WebLogic server is in trouble

Once you have enabled the Oracle Middleware plugin in Enterprise Manager and discovered your WebLogic servers, how do you get notified if something misbehaves?

First you need to configure Monitoring Templates. Monitoring Templates are used to set limits and thresholds for Metric Data. Metric Data are collected from your targets at given intervals. Actually the biggest task for any new Enterprise Manager installation is to configure the different Monitoring Templates for target types, environments and even custom metrics that you need to monitor.

It is possible to create new templates or used pre-created ones as a starting point. Even if you create a new one, it is not going to be empty. It has default metrics and limits already configured for the specific target type.

Not going into more details about Monitoring templates, have a look at the EM documentation here for more specific details.

Once the Monitoring Template has been created, it needs to be applied to a target. This can either be done via Administration Groups or directly by selecting the template and clicking [Apply] in the Monitoring Template list screen.

Apply the Monitoring template directly to a specific Target, Group, Farm or Domain

Once done, lets explore the Incident management settings

Incident Management

First, we need to configure an e-mail server connection if not done already:

Configure the correct e-mail server properties, username etc. and test the configuration by clicking the [Test Mail Servers] button.

Make sure that your user has been configured with a valid e-mail address by going into the Password & Email page:

Next, it is time to configure some Incident Rules:

Before beginning adding new rules, have a look at the little "play" button beneath the menu line.
TIP: These icons are links to YouTube videos that explain and demo functionality in EM.  

Press the link button and follow the links or play them directly from YouTube located here and here. The videos will take you through the process of creating rules and rule sets. 

Now go ahead and create your own rules and rule sets that you would like to use on your middleware, hosts, databases and other targets.

Subscribe to the work of others

Going back to the rule set menu, notice that it is possible to subscribe to other rule sets then the ones you create or target to yourself. 

 

Blackouts vs. disabling notifications

Some times I have seen examples of organizations disabling rule sets instead of creating Blackouts when performing maintenance. There are several reasons for doing this, but mainly the explanation has been that they want to still be able to see the up/down status of targets and not only black. Just remember to enable the rule sets afterwards, and clear any related incidents before they get escalated.