How-To: Using Composite Sensors to Track Application Data

Enterprise Manager is a great tool to track your BPM instances, but it can be difficult to determine which specific instance you are looking for.  For example, let’s say you have an application that allows you to book travel.  In order to find a particular travel request, you would need to do one of the following in Enterprise Manager:

1. Look through each instance and see if you can see the request id from the payload information.  But if your systems audit level is set to “Production”, you will be out of luck.
2. You can guess which instance matches the request by using the date/time the request was created.  But this can be very inaccurate if you have a lot of requests being processed.

This approach can be very cumbersome or impossible to do.  A better approach would be to use Composite Sensors and/or set the Composite Instance Title.  SOA/BPM 11g gives you these capibilities in order to correlate a business request id with a composite instance id.

Overview

Composite Sensor:  Allows you to implement trackable fields on messages.  They allow you to monitor incoming and outgoing messages as well as allow you to see fields of a particular instance.

setCompositeInstanceTitle:  Allows you to track your request in theComposite Instance Title bar of Enterprise Manager 

In order to provide you with all the information you need, I will split this capability into two parts.  I will first show you how to use Composite Sensors and then show you how to use the setCompositeInstanceTitle in another blog post.

Adding Composite Sensors

In order to add a composite sensor to your application, you will need to perform the following steps.

1. Right click a specific service to which to add a composite sensor, and select Composite Sensors or click on the Composite Sensor icon above the SOA Composite Editor.

2. The Composite Sensor Dialog will appear

3. Click on the green plus sign to add a new sensor.  This will bring up the Create Composite Sensor dialog

4. Fill out the following fields

5. Once you click OK, you will notice the sensor icon on your component.

Monitoring Composite Sensor Data in Enterprise Manager

In Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can monitor the composite sensor.  The composite sensor data can be searched for in the Instances page or it can be displayed in the flow trace.

View in Instances Page

1. Click on the application you wish to view
2. Click on the Instances tab
3. Under the Composite Sensors column, click on the icon to view the sensor for the specific instance

View in Instances Search Page

1. Click on the application you wish to view
2. Click on the Instances tab
3. Click on the Add Fields drop down box to add the composite sensor field

More Information

If you want to learn more about composite sensors, you can go to http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/integration.1111/e10224/sca_compsensors.htm#CIHGIDDE for more information.