If you are a WebSphere administrator and supporting production environment, then one of the challenging tasks is to monitor the important metrics for better control. You can use any monitoring tools which fit your requirement. Here, I will explain how to use Application Manager by Manage Engine for in-depth IBM WebSphere Application Server monitoring. Application Manager is not just for IBM WAS, but it supports many other technologies from a different stream. Ex:
WebLogic/Tomcat/GlassFish/.NET Sybase/Oracle/MongoDB Apache/Nginx/PHP/IIS/URL EC2/Azure/OpenStack Linux/Windows/IBM AIX
With the help of Application Manager, you can monitor various critical metrics to detect and quickly fix the issues.
Application Manager Features
Availability monitoring Track user experience Detect leaks Real-time alerting Actionable report & dashboard Root cause analysis
The good thing is, Manage Engine provide a FREE version for forever to monitor up to 5 application or servers.
How to install Application Manager?
You can either install it on Windows or Linux. The following installation instruction is based on Linux.
Download the software binary from Manage Engine Execute the downloaded bin file to start the installation wizard
You will get the wizard GUI popup, click Next
Accept the license agreement, click next You get 30 days trial of professional or enterprise edition so you may try else choose “Free Edition.”
Select the language By default, it will listen on 9090 port, change if you need to
You can either use PostgresSQL or Microsoft SQL as a database. PostgresSQL is bundled with the product so no need to install it additionally
Change the installation directory if needed. By default, it will install on /opt/ME/ Register the product if you need the technical support else skip and confirm to begin the installation It will take few minutes, and upon completion, you will get success message Well done! You’ve installed Application Manager successfully.
How to start WebSphere Monitoring?
First, you got to launch the Application Manager. Go to the path where you’ve installed (default location – /opt/ME/AppManager13/AppManager13 Execute the following It will take few seconds, and you will get a confirmation that necessary process modules are started, and you can connect to console at port 9090 Let’s access the console in the browser with default credential (user – admin, password – admin) Once logged in, it will prompt to configure SMTP for emails. You may do it or skip if you want to do it later. Let’s add a WebSphere Application Server
Click New Monitor » Add New Monitor and select “WebSphere Server” from the list Enter the WebSphere details and click “Add Monitors.”
Now, we should see the newly added WebSphere in the monitoring.
Go to Monitors » WebSphere Server You should see the health & availability of JVM
You can create an alarm to notify if JVM is not healthy or unavailable. Once you’ve added all the necessary monitoring, you can view them in multiple views. At any point in time, you need to get the report for historical data; you can go to Reports and select the type of reports you need. Application Manager looks promising to monitor Middleware technologies like Application Server, Web Server, Messaging, etc. You can also take Application Manager one level ahead of application performance monitoring by integrating APM Insight Agent. APM Insight monitors the application performance at the transactional level. So go ahead and play around with Application Manager by Manage Engine and see it it works for you.
