CA Wily Introscope
At Australia Post we have a growing production J2EE footprint both SAP and non-SAP. Unlike monitoring the trusty ABAP stack, the J2EE stack requires a more sophisticated and intuitive tool to help proactively monitor and debug errors. The ALM tool of choice for J2EE comes bundled with our Solution Manager software - CA Wily Introscope.
Our CA Wily Introscope deployment helps us to lower the costs associated with maintaining and supporting J2EE applications by:-
CA Wily Introscope infrastructure components
The old Way.
In the old days, the Basis support staff had to navigate through several directory levels to find an offending J2EE log file. Some of us got to learn how to use the following exciting tools:-
The new way.
A right to view (RTV) version of the CA Wily Introscope product is available for download as part of your Solution Manager license. The RTV CA Wily Introscope provides access to J2EE and host based data for SAP and Partner products with the following views:-
- Workstation Console - pre-built dashboards combining related graphs based on NetWeaver usage types
- Investigator - find and report on individual metrics of interest
- Sample Dashboards - a collection of all CA Wily metrics designed for further drill-down
- Transaction Tracer - trace and gather metrics for a live transaction , and;
- Reporting - Adobe PDF rendering of your favourite metrics
Solution Manager now provides streamlined access to CA Wily Introscope directly from the Root cause Analysis workcentre in two flavours:-
- Workstation - Heavy GUI approach to use all features of CA Wily Introscope
- WebView - read only http based Wily Introscope client providing read only access to performance data
Investment.
Setting up your CA Wily Introscope will require some prior planning. If you have a relatively complex landscape (say 30 instances or more) you should provision a standalone server for the Wily Enterprise Manger. As always, a second Wily Enterprise Manager for testing patches is also a good investment.
Once you have installed the Wily EM server, you will spend some hours getting your remote Wily Agents up and running. At our place, we have now streamlined this process to around 60 minutes per satellite system.
Lastly, the installation of the Wily Workstation on your desktop may test your SOE standard. You will need to have Administrative access to both install and run the Wily Workstation. Running the Wily Workstation on a desktop with less than 2 GB memory will also be a challenge.
Savings.
Once configured, CA Wily Introscope will help you to debug the most complex J2EE problems quickly and professionally.
Here are some recent findings derived from using CA Wily Introscope to monitor Volume testing for an MSS/ESS project:-
The capability to quickly debug this performance issue saved several days of cruising through logs, and removed the need for additional CPU and RAM to get through the rest of the Volume Testing.
Show me.
YouTube video
Bonus Information.
The full (separately chargeable) version of CA Wily Introscope with SAP Extended Diagnostics (SED) provides several additional benefits including:-
- Automated threshold alerting with integration to CA NSM/TNG
- Automated creation of Service Desk calls to BMC Remedy for incident detection and notification
- Enabling the creation of personalised Wily dashboards for:-
- Grouping of related metrics
- Improved reporting
- Metrics customization for multiple audiences
- Support for customised code in SAP.
- Extended instrumentation for non-SAP application server platforms (Power Packs and Portal Manager packages for WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle, Siteminder, Service Quality Manager, etc)
- Full license for Wily Introscope Alerting and Reporting infrastructure
- Leveraging the "common language" of CA Wily Introscope for other non-SAP J2EE based applications
- Role based user management with personalization
References.
The CA Wily website
The Solution Manager wiki
The Solution Manager forum
The Diagnostics SMP Alias
The ALM home page
Systems Operation
The ALM difficulty rating.
Expertise required. Medium.
Time taken to deploy. Medium.
Payback time. Medium.
Overall rating. If you have PI , CE or EP - then you must have CA Wily Introscope.
Thumbs up for CA Wily Introscope.