WebSphere Application Server V7.0: Concepts ... - IBM Redbooks

products, like the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Monitoring suite, support
these interfaces and provide ready-to-use agents to monitor your WebSphere
Application Server environment.
Transaction monitoring
The purpose of transaction monitoring is to monitor the environment from the
user perspective. Transaction monitoring uses pre-recorded transactions or click
sequences and replays them whereby the response for each replayed user
interaction is verified against expected results.
4.6.2 Performance and fault tolerance
Keep in mind that monitoring your environment (no matter at which level)
consumes additional resources. Ensure your monitoring setup does not cause
unacceptable impact to your environment.
The more you monitor, and the shorter the intervals between your monitoring
cycles, the quicker you can determine something out of the ordinary. But the
more you monitor, and the shorter the intervals between your monitoring cycles,
the higher the overhead you generate. The key to success is to find a good
balance between monitoring in sufficient short intervals to determine failures
without consuming an unacceptable amount of resources.
In addition to the performance impact, you need to make sure that any problems
in your monitoring infrastructure do not impact your environment. Monitoring,
even if there is something wrong in the monitoring infrastructure, must never be
the cause for any service outage.
4.6.3 Alerting and problem resolution
Monitoring alone is not enough to keep track of the health of your environment,
as monitoring does not solve issues. You improve availability if you combine your
monitoring with proper alerting to the responsible problem resolvers. What is the
use of monitoring if nobody knows that there is a problem? Some thoughts you
need to consider when planning for alerting:
► Who is alerted for which event?
► What are the required response times?
► How will the responsible persons be alerted?
► How will you avoid repeated alerts for the same events?
► How will alerts and the resolution of the alerts be documented?
► Who will track the alerts and problem resolution?
► Who is in charge of the alert until it is finally resolved?
► Who will perform the root cause analysis to avoid reoccurrences of the alert?
116 WebSphere Application Server V7.0: Concepts, Planning, and Design