Following my previous blog entries on building an Open ESB BPEL Monitor I decided to bring it all together in this blog and provide a simple User Guide that describes the current features. This page will also be available from within the downloaded war file (assuming you can connect to the internet).

Overview

The OpenESB BPEL Monitoring tool is built upon the standard OpenESB Management and Monitoring API and provides a simple interface to view the running BPEL Processes and their instances. At present only monitoring functionality is provided but the screens can be extended to implement management functions. When the page is first displayed, or refresh with the browser, the user will be presented with the Dashboard Tab and a list of currently deployed BPEL Modules and process as a List on the left of the screen. Selecting on of these processes will display the selected process with the Process Monitor tab.

Dashboard

Provides the user with a summary of all Bpel Instances that have been deployed to the application server.

Process Monitor

The Process Monitor is the main Tab that will be used and contains a number of sub-tabs that display process specific information. The information displayed within this tab is that associated with the select Business Process. When initially selected the Summary information will be displayed along with a representation of the business process. The summary information is that displayed for the selected process on the Dashboard tab.

The user can then select the Instances tab and this will display a, Filtered, list of all instances of the process and are colour coded based on their status as follows:

• Green : Completed.
• Blue : Running.
• Red : Terminated / Faulted.
• Yellow : Selected.

Above the table of Instances are a number of Filter fields that can be used to restrict and order the displayed instances.

When the user selects and instance the displayed Business Process will be updated to indicate the status of the individual Activities within the Business Process thus highlighting where the business process is in its processes and any activities where it is either waiting or broken.

In addition to this if the Business Process Invokes another, Sub-Process, within the same deployment the user will be able to click on the Invoke and drill down to the Sub-Process.

For any selected Instance the user can select the Activities Tab and a table of all the activities within the Process will be displayed along with their associated statistics.

The Statistics Tab will display simple processing Statistics for the Select BPEL Process Instances displayed in the Instance Table and the data is controlled by the same filter criteria.

For large Business Processes the user can select, from the configuration tab, to Collapse the Composite Activities. This will collapse the Sequences and Scopes within the Business Process to a Single Icon, thus reducing overall screen real-estate, which will be selectable allowing the user to expand the collapsed activity.

When the user has selected an Activity to expand the Composite Activity will be displayed with a small Icon in the to right that will allow the user to collapse the Activity again.

Configuration

The Configuration Tab allows the user to specify a number of optional parameters that will affect the way that the monitor will be displayed. The configuration parameters available in the present release are as follows and have the functionality described below:

• Refresh Period : Defines the Refresh period for the data displayed within the Monitor. If this is set to "Manual Refresh" then the monitor data will only be refreshed when the user selects the Browsers Refresh button.
• Process Layout : Simply defines the display layout for the business process. This allows you to switch between standard OpenESB Vertical layout to a more browser friendly horizontal layout.
• Icon Set : Defines the Icon Set to be used within the display of the Business Process. At present you can select between the standard Open ESB Icons and an alternative set.
• Icon Size : Allow the user to select the size of the icons to be displayed. This can be useful for large business processes that do not fit easily on the page.
• Layout : Additional BPEL Process Layout functions:
• Show Sequence Names : Display the Sequence Name for all Sequences in the process.
• Show Scope Names : Display the Scope Name for all scopes within the process.
• Hide Assigns : Flag to indicate if the Assigns should be displayed within the Business Process. Useful for large business processes.
• Collapse Composite Activities : Flag to indicate if the Composite Activities (Sequence and Scope) should be collapsed. If this flag is set the user will be able to click the collapsed Activity to expand it and see the contained Activities.

Once the properties have been chosen the "Update" button will apply the settings and redisplay the Process Monitor tab.

Adding New Icon Sets

With the latest release of the Monitor we are able to customise the Monitor Web Application by adding additional Icon Sets. Once added these Icons can be used instead of the standard shipped Icons. The following step show you how to this can be done:

1. Create an Icon Set of type .png and with the specific names used in the existing Icon Sets. To check you have this correct look in <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons/openesb.
2. Create a sub directory of <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons to contain your icons (myicons) and copy the icons into it.
3. Edit the <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/iconsets.properties file and add the following:
   
   myicons=My Icons Display Name (This is what will appear in the drop down)
   
   
4. Refresh the monitor page and choose your Icon Set.

Performance Tweaks

If you are seeing some performance degradation when their is a large number of instances within the BPELSE monitoring database we can improve query performance by adding the following indexes to the database.

CREATE INDEX idx_BPELID ON MONITORBPELINSTANCE(BPELID);
CREATE INDEX idx_CRMPINVOKEID ON MONITORBPELACTIVITY(CRMPINVOKEID);
CREATE INDEX idx_CRMPRECEIVEID ON MONITORBPELACTIVITY(CRMPRECEIVEID);

This can be achieved by opening / creating a connection the the bpelseDB within NetBeans and executing the commands against the connection.