#580 ICS 17.2.5 Management / Monitoring

Many customers, moving from SOA Suite / Service Bus environments to ICS, have questions around management/monitoring etc.

There is, of course, a paradigm change when one moves to the cloud - no install, no management of the underlying infrastructure etc. So what do the sys admins need to know in respect of ICS?

High level monitoring is available at cloud admin level -

Now to ICS itself...

Monitoring -


 If someone just needs to monitor ICS, then all they need is the following role -

Then can then log in to ICS and do the necessary -

Integration Health -

Here is the monitoring page from a test instance I am using -

This page is showing the health of the integrations.
Some of this is design time relevant - e,g, you can see that only 39% of the integrations have been activated.

You also see the salient information on the number of messages received, processed - successfully/failures.

You also see the hourly and daily history (last 30 days).

So, for those coming from Service Bus/SOA Suite, this is somewhat akin to Fusion Middleware EM, albeit at a higher level.

You can also download the ICS log files from here -

We will review these later, when I go thru a simple demo.


You can also switch to sub-pages, so to speak, on this page -

System Health

Refers more to the underlying components -

Again, similar somewhat to what one can glean from EM.
A system is either available - green / unavailable - red / not configured - grey

Database Management

Database changes to orange when 70% of space is used.
Also note, the database is in the state - Unquiesced.
Quiesce is another word for pause.
The database, on reaching 80% of space used, will move into a quiesced state -
so now requests to ICS can be processed.

The database needs to be purged on a regular basis - this will be very familiar to those who
have administered SOA Suite. Just click on the pencil icon -

The retention period setting supports the following units -

You can also do an immediate purge -

File System Management

The warning threshold here is 85%
ICS goes into read only state, if this hits 90%.
Read only state means activation of instances, imports/.exports are no longer possible.


Regarding File System Status -

The name AdminServer is familiar to all weblogic admins, and the above
list gives one a good idea of what is actually running under the ICS hood.

Design Time Metrics

Here all salient info regarding the state of design time artifacts is displayed.
Note also the Design Time Audit - yes, I have obfuscated some of the data here.
Great source of info - on who did what and when.

I can also drill down as follows -

The Monitoring Sidebar allows for easy navigation -

Here I look at the Integrations -

I can also navigate back -

Let's now look at settings -

Settings 

Certificates - upload as required.

Notifications - who should get informed and when -

Here is such a Notification -

Database - the purge settings, already discussed -

Logging Levels - self explanatory -

Recommendations - allows you to publish your mapping recommendations to the ICS
community.

API Platform - here you can specific your API Platform instance, allowing you to expose and manage the APIs of your ICS integrations.

Nothing like a simple example...

The above was mostly monitoring, now to a simple demo integration -

Here I have an orchestration, trigger is a REST interface, target is Service Cloud (createOrg).

Note the menu options, and the new - Manage API with APIP CS.

Anyway, I test the integration in Postman -

I get an Internal Server Error -

Fault received on invocation of target :https://gsefmwr11.rightnowdemo.com/cgi-bin/integration_test.cfg/services/soap <![CDATA[ \nFault Code : wsse:FailedAuthentication\nFault String : Access Denied\

Now, you could guess this has something to do with the username/password for RightNow.
But let's see how we can debug this -

Back in the Monitoring page -

I check the activity stream - error is -

One can download the stream, if required -

Now to the error itself -

Here I can drill into the individual errored instances -

Now to the Diagnostic logs -

I can go thru the diagnostic log and look for my integration - NC_REST_CREATEORG

I can see the payload in the ics-flow.log

I also see the error in the ics_server.out file -

So now I check the RightNow connection in ICS -

I fix the password and re-test -

I re-test the request in Postman -

Now, one area I have not, as yet, discussed is Incidents.

You can see the following link on the Monitoring page of ICS -

So what is an incident?

According to the ICS user guide -
You can report incidents for problematic issues that occur during design time (for
example, being unable to open an integration, the failure of connection testing, or the
failure of artifact regeneration).

How do you do this?

Once you click Create, you will receive a confirmation message in the format -
Incident report successfully created with ID: "number". You can download it
right now or later from the Monitoring dashboard.

Now you can download the incident - and maybe attach the file to an SR.

Management and Monitoring - Non UI based

So what options are available outside of the console?

What about integration with system management tools such as Nagios?

Many customers are not into having to login to ICS to get alerts etc.

1. Notifications

I have already covered this above.

2. ICS REST API

A good starting point for integration with system management tools such as Nagios

Check out the REST API here

3. ICS REPL based management utility from the A-Team

Check it out here