BEA Guardian: A New Model of Pre-Emptive Support

by Robert Brass
09/19/2006

Abstract

As application environments get more complex, developers are spending ever-increasing amounts of time debugging integration issues. While some propose to address this issue by attempting to create monolithic, "all things to everyone" packages, customers are naturally reluctant to be locked into an inflexible, proprietary solution and be at the mercy of one company. Instead, developers need the flexibility and access to the latest technology that comes from integrating the best solutions available on the market from multiple vendors.

Guardian addresses the integration complexity issue by creating a new model for customer support. This model breaks the old "find and fix" model and establishes a new, preemptive model that searches for integration problems before they impact customers' environments. It also breaks the old "sift through multiple application log files" model and establishes a new, "aware of its environment" model that identifies the root cause of problems. This article provides an introduction to BEA Guardian, how it can preemptively avoid problems in your development and deployment environments, and how you can start making use of its functionality.

Introduction

Guardian is a management tool that taps into the knowledge the BEA Support organization has gained from years of helping customers find and resolve problems. By sifting through customer problems, pinpointing the root causes, and perfecting the solutions, BEA's engineers have created a host of signatures that can evaluate any customer's environment. And by creating programmatic methods for detecting these signatures, the signature authors have allowed Guardian to become truly aware of its environment. Guardian V1.0 supports the evaluation of BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and above, and any BEA products built on the WebLogic Server 8.1 architecture and above.

Guardian's user interface is an Eclipse Rich Client Platform application that's intuitive, easy to install, and can keep itself updated. The Guardian UI can run on a Windows or Linux platform. The Guardian engine is a standalone Java application that needs only a JVM version 5.0 to run. The Guardian Agent is a lightweight Web application installed on your domains that uses Java Management Extensions (JMX), Java System Properties, and JDBC drivers to collect the data needed to determine the presence of signatures. The Guardian application communicates with the Agent using HTTP or HTTPS. The Agent executes the commands sent by the application and returns the results. The bulk of the work is done on the Guardian server to minimize the impact to the environment.

The Guardian signatures are XML files that use the World Wide Web Consortium's XQuery technology to determine the susceptibility of the environment being evaluated to the problem the signature defines. The signatures can be thought of as an XML instruction set. Embedded in the signature is the version of the OS, the architecture, and the BEA product that the signature is meant to run on. Signatures will be executed only in an environment that matches those parameters to optimize execution time. The signature identifies the data that needs to be collected from the customer's environment, the pattern to match the data with, and the results to display if the pattern is found. New signatures can be downloaded from BEA at the touch of a button through the Guardian UI.

A server on BEA.com allows users to download the latest signatures and update the Guardian application itself. Users can even open their own support cases to get help resolving any signatures Guardian detects.

By decoupling the user interface from the knowledge base and the agent, Guardian allows all users to leverage their accumulated knowledge in developing and deploying enterprise applications.

Preempting Problems Before They Occur (Use Cases)

Guardian helps you find and fix problems before they impact your domain. By identifying known configuration and environment issues and recommending solutions, Guardian can:

• Plug security holes
• Prevent system outages
• Improve system performance

The following Guardian screen shot shows the results of an evaluation that detected three signatures: a critical BEA Security Advisory about cleartext passwords, a critical potential server hang problem, and a warning about a potential performance issue. Each signature includes a recommendation on how to fix the problem that has been proven to work in other customers' domains.

Figure 1. Domain Explorer evaluation history

The following sections describe usage scenarios that illustrate some of the ways you can use Guardian to get the most out of your applications.