Random Tip: Using WebLogic Admin Server to Monitor Services

Happy Friday!  There’s nothing quite like needing to restart one or all of your EPM services.  First you have to shut it all down and make sure it’s actually down.  Then you have to start it up in the right order and then you have to make sure it’s actually up before you send users back in.  Lately, I’ve started using the WebLogic Admin Server to help me with this in my Home Lab.

Let me start by saying that I am NOT an infrastructure guy.  I work with a lot of infrastructure guys and have done a lot of personal installs in my home lab, but I’m an applications guy.  So…if someone on the infrastructure side says this is a horrible idea, I’ll let you take it up with them.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to how we use the Admin Server.  As a little bit of a background story, when your installation was completed, you were likely deployed to multiple servers.  My deployment is pretty distributed, so I have server for Planning, HFM, Essbase, Shared Services, etc.  Each time those servers are configured, they have to be registered with the Admin Server.  Once that is complete, the Admin Server doesn’t necessarily need to be running any more, so you may need to start it up.

To start the admin server, find Start Admin Server for Weblogic Server Domain shortcut in the Start Menu on your Foundation Server.  It should be named this on both 11.1.2.3 and 11.1.2.4.

Once you click on that shortcut, a command prompt should start up letting you know what’s going on.  Eventually, you should get a message saying that the server has changed to a RUNNING state:

Now we can go find the shortcut for the Admin Server Console in the start menu:

This should open up your browser to the Admin Console login screen:

Log in here using youe Weblogic Domain Admin account (typically epm_admin).  Once you get logged in, you should see this:

This is 11.1.2.3.500, so it may look moderately different on 11.1.2.4.  Let’s stop here for a general warning:

You can do all sorts of things in this console that could do something bad to your environment.  So be careful.  I just look around…I don’t change things!

Once you see the screen above, expand Environment and then click on Servers:

This should give you a list of all of your services, clusters, machine names, service states, and even the listening ports:

That’s neat and all, but why do I really care outside of seeing service health?  Well, when I restart, I’m impatient, but i don’t really want to try out Workspace until I’m sure everything is up.  So I end up waiting longer than I need to most of the time.  And again, I’m impatient.  So on my 11.1.2.4 environment I needed to stop and restart Planning.  So first let’s see what it looks like when I have a stopped service:

Now let’s look at the HyperionPL24.hyperion.local services console:

It is in fact down.  It also needs to be switched to manual…but I’ll work on that later.  So let’s go ahead and restart the service:

That was easy!  It’s already running!  Except that we all know that the services console lies.  It’s not really running, its just running the process that starts the process.  So how do we know when it’s really started?  Option 1…we can go old school and look at the service logs.  It will eventually update to say that the state has been changed to RUNNING.  Option 2…we can just go see if it’s there in Workspace.  Call me paranoid, but I always feel like I’m going to break something if I don’t wait until it’s done.  Option 3…refresh the admin server list from above.  It will eventually register that it’s STARTING:

And finally let you know that its RUNNING:

I’m sure that there are plenty of other cool and interesting things that we could break do with the Admin Console, but this is my simple use.  I hope some of you find this helpful, or at the very least…interesting.