Monitoring and Managing the ESB

WSO2 ESB provides a variety of options to monitor and manage the server runtime from the Monitor tab in the management console. (As mentioned previously, you can log into the management console at https://localhost:9443/carbon/ using “admin” as the username and password.)

This topic contains the following sections:

Mediation tracing

You can monitor messages that are mediated through the ESB using the Mediation Tracer in the management console. To view entries in the Mediation Tracer, you must first enable tracing for the proxy service and the sequence. Let’s enable tracing for the In and Out sequences of our proxy service SimpleStockQuoteProxy that is deployed within the ESB.

On the Main tab of the management console, go to Services -> List.
Click SimpleStockQuoteProxy.
Click Enable Tracing and Enable Statistics under Specific Configuration. The first option enables mediation tracing for this proxy service, whereas the second option enables the collection of mediation statistics, which we'll view in the next section.
You are now ready to send a request and trace the mediation.
Send a request to SimpleStockQuoteService through SoapUI as you did in the previous lesson.
Click the Monitor tab in the management console, and then click Mediation Tracer. You can view all the messages relating to SimpleStockQuoteProxy as follows.

Mediation statistics

Mediation statistics allow a server administrator to collect and view runtime statistical information from sequences, proxy services, and endpoints through the ESB management console. This provides a simple but effective way of determining the runtime performance of the ESB. The collected statistical data can be used to analyze network traffic patterns and draw rough estimates on how the service bus will be used in the future.

To view mediation statistics, you must first enable the statistics collector in the ESB. To do this, you will modify a property in carbon.xml, which is the master configuration file for WSO2 ESB.

Open <ESB_HOME>/repository/conf/carbon.xml in a text/XML editor.
Search for the StatisticsReporterDisabled property, change its value to false, and then save and close the file.
In Developer Studio, on the Servers tab, right-click the WSO2 server and choose Restart.
After the server has restarted, send a request to SimpleStockQuoteService through SoapUI as you did previously.
Log in to the management console, click the Monitor tab, and then click Mediation Statistics.
The screen displays charts representing a summary of the mediation statistics for the server (WSO2 ESB) and the proxy services.

You can click Server Statistics to see message counts and processing times, or click Proxy Service Statistics to see a breakdown of the statistics by proxy service.

Notice that no statistics were collected for sequences or endpoints. This is because we did not enable statistics for our endpoint or the default sequence (Main) that we used. If you want to see statistics for these, you can go to the Main tab, click Sequences or Endpoints, and enable statistics for the sequences and endpoints you want to track. You can then send another request through SoapUI and see the results on the Mediation Statistics page.

Other monitoring options

In addition to monitoring mediation tracing and statistics, you can monitor the system logs. For more information, see Monitoring the ESB. You can also send statistical information to WSO2 Business Activity Monitor for more advanced analysis. For more information, see Integrating with WSO2 BAM, WSO2 DAS and WSO2 CEP.

Where to go next

You have now explored the basics of using WSO2 ESB and are ready to get started creating your own proxy services and sequences. Explore the topics in the table of contents of this guide to learn more about working with the ESB and detailed information on all the mediators you can use, a variety of samples, reference information, and more. For information on the various integration patterns you can implement, see Enterprise Integration Patterns with WSO2 ESB.