Welcome to WLWatchman

The latest release is 1.3rc2 - this release primarily introduces the (as yet, incomplete) console; the command line version of WLWatchman is fully functional.

Sometimes diagnosing what's going on inside a WebLogic Server instance is just a little too hard; never mind trying to keep an eye on what several servers in a cluster are doing all at once!

If you've ever wanted to watch the execute queues on all your servers at once, wanted to see how the number of stuck threads correlated to the number of JDBC connections in use or ever wished the runtime data in the WebLogic Server^TM admin console could be streamed to a file for later analysis, then WLWatchman is for you. WLWatchman is a pure Java^TM tool for monitoring the runtime state of a entire WebLogic^TM domain. It can be run from any PC or workstation that can meet the requirements of a 1.4.2 or later JDK, and a weblogic.jar from the same version of WebLogic Server^TM as you want to monitor - WLWatchman has been tested and runs happily against WebLogic Server^TM 6.1, 7.0 and 8.1. (Unfortunately, from our viewpoint, WLS9.0 uses an updated JMX specification and WLWatchman 1.3 and earlier won't run against it. Ho hum. You'll have to wait for 1.4, in that case.) Furthermore, as it uses vanilla JMX for querying the runtime state of the server, you don't need to have the WebLogic Portal^TM or WebLogic Integration^TM specific classes on the client machine.

WLWatchman has the following features:

• Parallel monitoring of multiple servers with automatic reconnection if a server is restarted - this means you can monitor every server in a domain but don't need to have them all up and running whilst WLWatchman is doing its stuff.
• Easy generation of configuration files with configurable exclusion or inclusion lists of Runtime MBeans - this means you don't need to hand-crank an XML document, nor wade through details of Runtime MBeans you're simply not interested in.
• Real-time graphing of any attribute available on any Runtime MBean in the domain; multiple graphs can be viewed at the same time, one per MBean, so you can watch the current free heap size for all servers simultaneously.
• Visual display of the current value of all attributes for any Runtime MBean in the domain
• Logging of runtime statistics to file for later analysis; each monitored object has its attributes logged to its own file.
• Formatting of gathered statistics in any desired format though the use of an extensible formatting framework. Sample formatters are provided.
• Alert-based monitoring of runtime attributes and the raising of alerts when specified criteria are met (such as a threshold being exceeded). Sample alerts are provided.

In addition, you need know (next to) nothing about JMX to use it :-)

WLWatchman is a pure Java tool that is freely available under a BSD style open-source license; please refer to the link above or the file LICENSE for license and copyright information.

In addition, WLWatchman uses the following third-party libraries:

• JDOM, distributed under a BSD/Apache style license.
• JChart2D, distributed under the LGPL.
• Sun's Swing Icons, distributed under this license.

WebLogic, WebLogic Server, WebLogic Portal and WebLogic Integration are trademarks of BEA Systems.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems.

This documentation was put together using XEmacs and Apache Forrest; images prepared (by and large) using the Gimp.