Guardian - What a tool!

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Pete Inman's Blog | March 27, 2008   5:42 AM | Comments (0)

My first blog entry....ever, as it's the only time I've thought I have something worth sharing!

Feel free to comment - but be nice!

Anyway, what's it about?

Well - I've been using BEA Guardian for a few months in it's various versions and thought I'd share my experiences.

The first version we had, was pretty bad in terms of performance - I would go as far as saying that in my environment it was pretty unusable. I had a look, thought it looked good, but clicking on an evaluation would grind my PC to a halt, so I gave up.

I'm pleased to say that I'm currently using Version 1.07 and that is MUCH BETTER! and it is now extremely usable and useful.

I don't have a huge WLS installation to look after - only 12 JVM's in production and I have a duplicate test environment, but having the ability to perform an inventory of my domain and find out exactly what I have configured is an invaluable sanity check! I know control and procedures should govern WLS configuration, but as in most environments, occasionally things get missed!

So, why has it potentially saved me time?

With Version 1, it really wasn't usable as I said earlier and at this time, we had a problem on our production system with WLS not handling the "&" character correctly in our SOAP messages. The SOAP message payload was wrapped in CDATA, so in theory should have been fine.

For whatever reasons at the time, we didn't realise this could have been a WLS problem, so we changed the client application and some WLS code quite quickly, had to roll out a new client application to 30 customers and the problem was solved.

Meanwhile, a new version of Guardian + signatures came along which I tried out, and, guess what....a patch existed to fix a problem where WLS was not handling CDATA segments in SOAP messages correctly!

We're running 8.1 SP6 at now, so this isn't an issue any more and we've also fixed our client application, but it would have been nice to know in advance, as this would have saved plenty of time and stress!

What would I like it to do?

I'd like it to do a couple of things -

1. It would be nice if I could compare inventory's - for example, compare the test & production environments.
2. I'd like to be able to ignore certain signatures if they don't apply to my environment - we use the IIS plug-in for example, so I don't need to be reminded about security issues with the apache plug-in.
3. It may already be possible to submit signature ideas, but we use the Microsoft SQL2005 JDBC driver and the 2005 version is configured slightly differently to the 2000 driver in terms of settings - one configuration works with all stored procedure call's and one doesn't - having a signature which picked that up would then allow Guardian to be used for a sanity check of a new domain.

The good news is that at least these 2 features, the first two (more probably) are coming in Version 1.1 which is due for GA on 31st March, but available in Tech Preview edition at the moment!

What problems have I had?

I have to say that I have had a couple of signatures that have told me my configuration is incorrect, yet the configuration has been running for several years like that and seems to work OK! A little worrying and confusing, but logging a call with tech support soon sorted those out and the signatures were corrected.

I don't see this as too much of a problem - If more people use the tool, and report any issues, then signature accuracy will improve no end.

The other main problem was performance, but in later versions this seems to be solved.

Why not use it?

I honestly can't see a reason why you wouldn't want to use it - perhaps that's because I'm running a fairly simple environment, but when version 1.1 comes out, I will use it to monitor my developers installations as well as my test and production environments as I do now.

Just being able to evaluate your domain, and browse through patches available, should save anyone time. Odd things I've seen in the 8.1 WebLogic console for example, which don't actually bother me that much - not enough to raise a case on, I suddenly find a patch is available to fix it. Raise the case through Guardian, and it's all done.

It's got to be a good thing!

Thanks for reading......

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