WebLogic Admin Tricks & Tips

We had an issue on production environment. Suddenly one of the webserver got crashed that no one aware of it. That was happen in the Weekend there were no users accessing at that time. When the business hour started Monday morning customer reported to service desk that one of the URL is not working for them. We middleware support team check the URL and identified that the HTTP server not working. Next action items as you know taking the logs backup and starting the HTTP server done. As part of issue management preventive action to this there could be a monitoring of the URLs. All the web servers hosted application, load balancer that is serving the application or Application server that hosted the web application must be checked randomly or every day before business hours starts. To do this monitoring team started working on listing out all loadbalancer URL, primary, secondary webserver URLs and also Application server hosted URL lists and checking on the browser each URL. Here is t...

Middleware Admin means the day runs with Emergency calls or On-calls, supporting team task always under high pressure cooker -- many of them feel tension tension due to heat in the head many got into hair-fall!!! ... Its a challenging task, only those who can handle the jobs under pressure can do this with tricks. But When you don't have calls you might think to reduce your stress in the work with smart automation scripting to make life more easier. Best Practices for WebLogic Logs If the environment is shorter let say it is size of 10 - 20 managed servers, then the best idea is to implement is that all these managed server logs, JMS stores must shared a common mount point . When application support team run into issues, this will give you the flexibility to search the logs easily and faster way to get rid of issues with this unique log location. In most of your project environments you might find the multiple logs such as application reated, JMS message stores or some tran...

If you digest Operating Systems basics or SHELL basics, you might think much effectively and you can make  more optimized ways to leverage your work, you can design your script with enhanced ability with productivity. Once you taste that flavor in my scripts, you can feel that and understand that why did I told those exaggerated words. Let me share my experience on this. In every J2EE production environment is going to have an application code (most of the developer say it the composition of 'dist' and 'properties'), which could be no-stage mode deployment style. Where you need to have a copy of code on every WebLogic server running machine. For every production release there could be success or fail. A wise WebLogic Administrator always takes the backup of the existing code and then go further to do fresh code deployment. According to the best practices of WebLogic deployment process, First time you will do the sample test on the production environment by making ...

In the last post I was made deeper research on getting the process id of all WebLogic instances with a script. After looking to that script, My asked me 'Why don't you try for a script for bouncing a WebLogic instance?'. I thought that's really good idea, this makes WebLogic Admin life more easier, which is very much need for every WebLogic Admin. Let me get all the clues before putting the logic into the script. The bounce script will take the input as WebLogic instance name. Then the script should do search for the corresponding Java Process id of given WebLogic instance. That Java Process ID can be used for finding: 1. Thread dump 2. Domain directory 3. Shutdown instance (kill the process) Above 1, 3 are commonly used commands but 2nd one required when situation like this, on the same machine if there exists multiple WebLogic domain instances then how to find the WebLogic instance started from? Here, I need to find the origin directory of startManaged...

You might be wonder what is fun in this blog looking for X11 forwarding on Solaris 5.10!! You might be excited to see the beauty of colorful Oracle Fusion Middleware WebLogic 11g installation window when you executable binaries (wls1033_solaris32.bin), You might wish to see Oracle WebLogic domain configuration Wizard (config.sh), Oracle WebLogic Domain Template builder (config_builder.sh), BEA Smart Update (bsu.sh) windows or your Oracle Database 11g while you work on a remote UNIX machines. After spending few hours on the Internet found many blogs written on their experiences, few document on websites, which illustrated about SSH, X11 forwarding in UNIX. I understand that what I need to do? To achieve my objective X11 Forwarding using SSH window, I must have a X emulating software installed on my desktop. you guys have this on your desktop?? If not install Hummingbird Connectivity (Xming is alternative) My experimenting environment is Solaris 10, Oracle WebLogic, SSH ...

Today morning one of my buddy pinged me from my team, seeking help on an issue he is faceing in his newly  configured WL domain for his learnings. Understanding the Issue My buddy novice WLA is trying to start the WebLogic instance on a remote machine. He is working on Solaris 10 operating environment, WebLogic 9.2. I asked for Java version, He executed the following command: $ java -version I asked for jps command execution the system is refused and said that ' jps is bad cammand'. I understand that  JAVA_HOME is not set for his environment. asked for echo $PATH. It is showing Java Path. Ohh!! what is missing then?? $which java this resulted that JAVA_HOME is NOT set to weblogic installation JDK, it was pointed to JAVA_HOME come with the Solaris installation.  I understand that could be one of the reason of not starting the server instance. Update the .profile file with  JAVA_HOME as required to set JDK residing in W...

Here I am jotting out few interesting Best practices for Oracle WebLogic environments, which I have experienced/encountered hurdles while preparing a WebLogic Domain. To Win this Running race you must overcome these hurdles, the best solutions is remembering all of them now I am sharing with you guys here: 1. Dedicated User and group Oracle WebLogic installation on Solaris machine or Linux or a Windows machine, it is better to have a dedicated user and shared growup where you can install the Middleware components WebLogic, Coherence, WebCenter sites, Content Management etc. provide access to all  so that all other users need not to installing  for each new domain on the same machine. useradd [options] LOGIN Some of important options are: -d home directory -s starting program (shell) -p password -g (primary group assigned to the users) -G (Other groups the user belongs to) -m (Create the user's home directory My experiment: useradd -g wladev -s /bin/bash -p xxxxxx...