Weblogic monitoring

For A while now, We were getting some performance issues with our ADF application on weblogic server. So when we tried to  trace the issue we had to follow several steps.

•  Thread dump analysis:

to get a thread dump you do :

1. log in to the weblogic admin console.
2. in the domain structure pane on the left side of the screen click on the domain_name link .
3. in the settings for the domain_name pane click on the monitoring tab then click on the health sub-tab.
4. click on the server in the domain that you want to take the thread dump to.

     5.  in the opened window click on the monitoring tab the click on the threads subtab

     6.  press Dump thread stack button .

    7. you will get the following:

    8. copy the dump to text editor and save it.

    9. refresh the page to get a new dump.

   10. repeat steps(8,9) several times to get a number of thread dumps.

ok, now that you have a number of thread dumps, you can start to analyze them .

you can simply read them in a text editor of your choice. though I don't recommend it fearing for your mental health. 

What I do recommend though is to use one of the thread analysis tools available on the web.

I tried :

1)Thread Dump analyzer: http://yusuke.homeip.net/samurai/en/index.html

2) ThreadLogic: https://java.net/projects/threadlogic/downloads

personally , I prefer threadLogic since it's more user friendly and makes it easier to trace the dump files.

after tracing several dumps we noticed that there were a lot of threads waiting on a Database read,

after going through the database logs and some other steps we managed to solve the problem.

• Monitoring the Weblogic resources:

there is a good extension in weblogic that could be helpful in monitoring some of the resources of the weblogic server.

you can access it through:   <weblogic_machine_host_name>:<admin_port>/console/dashboard

you can monitor JDBC connections,Thread count, Heap size and it will be presented graphically.

I know that theses values can be fetched from several pages in the weblogic console, but the through the dashboard you can have several values in the same chart in graphical presentation.