#webtier

[kristerrio]

How to Discover Standalone Oracle WebTier 11g Instances in Oracle Cloud Control 12c

Now I know what your going to say, your thinking Oracle WebTier allows you to associate an WT instance with a Weblogic Domain and when you do this Cloud Control will auto-discover it. That is true, but when you are managing large scale environments, sometimes it doesn't make sense to associate WebTier instances with individual domains. This is particularly true when you are running several domains on the same server, why have individual WebTier instances per domain when 1 or 2 will do! 

Having standalone WebTier instances does have a couple of drawbacks with respect to Oracle Cloud Control 12c. The most obvious is that standalone WebTier instances are not automatically discovered like other targets. This post outlines how you can add your standalone WebTier instances as targets to Cloud Control 12c.

To add a standalone Oracle WebTier instance to CC12, you must add it by specifying its target properties. To do this:

Within CC12, navigate to 'Setup' -> 'Add Targets' -> 'Add Targets Manually'

Select the 'Add Non-Host Targets by Specifying Target Monitoring Properties' radio button.

From the 'Target Type' drop down, select 'Oracle HTTP Server'. Then select the agent for the host that the standalone WebTier instance resides on from the 'Monitoring Agent' field and then click 'Add Manually'.

On the next page you will be presented with a long list of property fields. Don't worry, only a few of them are required. Enter the values outlined for the fields below, and for any other required fields just enter 'x'. Once done, click 'Ok'

Machine Name: host name of server WebTier instance resides on

Oracle Home Path: path to the WebTier installation.

Port Number: WebTier listening port (i.e 7777)

Version of the Apache Server: 2.2

There, you've added your standalone WebTier instance to CC12. It will take CC12 a couple of minutes to start aggregating data for the new target so be patient, but once this is complete, you will now be able to see the availability status in CC12.

This brings me to the second drawback of having standalone WebTier instances as targets in CC12. When a WebTier instance is not associated with a Weblogic domain you do not see any of the enhanced metrics in CC12 such as performance. You can only see the Response Metric ( Target Up/Down). Now this isn't a big deal I feel in Development and Test environments, but for Production I like to see all the information I can, so keep this in mind. You may want to associate your WebTier instances with a domain in Production environments so you can see all of the metrics.

[kristerrio]

Integrating Weblogic Console with Oracle WebTier

Over the past couple of months I have been tasked on a number of projects to upgrade from Oracle 10g middleware to Oracle's 11g Fusion Middleware. As an IT resource who primarily deals in the middleware space I can say that this is a welcomed initiative!

However, during the upgrade of a number of environments I was running into a strange situation that baffled myself and my colleagues for a few weeks. Today though, we finally sorted it out.

As part of our move to Oracle Weblogic Application Server, we also wanted to place the Oracle WebTier (primarily Oracle HTTP Server) out in front of each install to better manage and secure our web traffic. The installations of both Weblogic Application Server and Oracle WebTier were very straight forward and configuring Oracle HTTP Server to talk to Oracle Weblogic Server was a piece of cake with the mod_wl_ohs plugin.

The issue we ran into though was related to the way that the Weblogic Admin Console redirects traffic after saving a configuration change. We were able to navigate the Admin Console through when accessing through Oracle HTTP Server, but when we made a configuration change, and clicked save we were being redirected away from the Oracle HTTP Server to the Weblogic AdminServer port. Confused yet, me too! Example time:

We were accessing the Admin Console through Oracle HTTP Server so our URL was:

http://localhost:7777/console

While navigating through the console we remained on localhost:7777. However, when we clicked save after making a configuration change, we were redirected to:

http://localhost:7001/console

I know what your thinking, big deal. Well, this does pose a big problem if you plan on accessing the console through a reverse proxy. Because when the redirect happens, you will get a nasty connection reset message because you may not necessarily have access to port 7001.

This was what happened to us. The good news is, it is a simple solution to eliminate the redirect. In the Admin Console, navigate to Preferences -> Shared Preferences and uncheck the "Follow Configuration Changes" option. There, thats it. No more redirects when you click save. Isn't IT great!