One of our best practices for administering the IBM Continuous Engineering (CE) solution is to establish an enterprise monitoring strategy allowing administrators to proactively and reactively monitor the application environment.

In v6.0 of the IBM CE Solution, we introduced the ability to version artifacts across the lifecycle domains.  With it came three new applications – Global Configuration Mangement (GCM), Link Index Provider (LDX), and Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) – along with higher resource demands.  Given this increased complexity, it is all the more imperative that IBM CE deployment environments be monitored.

Starting in v6.0.3, our strategy has been:

1. Identify resource-intensive scenarios so they can be documented, logged, correlated and published.
2. Publish the key performance metrics from the application server and the application as JMX MBeans so that it is extensible.
3. Document our MBeans which provide different application metrics.
4. Develop best practices around integration of MBeans with 3rd party monitoring systems.

The application teams’ adoption and implementation of the strategy evolved and increased in each release, culminating in 6.0.5.  Now our focus is shifting to encouraging customer adoption.

To learn more about these capabilities, see the following articles on resource-intensive scenarios and Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) Monitoring.

• Known Resource-intensive Scenarios
  https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/CLMExpensiveScenarios
• CLM Monitoring Managed Beans Reference
  https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/CLMMonitoringMBeans
• CLM Monitoring
  https://jazz.net/library/article/91590
• Rational Team Concert: External content repositories
  https://jazz.net/library/article/90403
• Monitoring the performance of Lifecycle Query Engine using MBeans
  https://jazz.net/library/article/90785

Tim Feeney
Executive IT Specialist
tfeeney@us.ibm.com