Friday, March 18, 2011

Desktop Events with OpenSpan and Oracle CEP - Part 1

Oracle’s Complex Event Processing Engine can be used to monitor large volumes of real-time data feeds but how do you enable your existing applications to trigger and react with the CEP engine?

With OpenSpan Events you can quickly and easily monitor any application or set of applications on a user’s desktop - including Windows, Web, Java, mainframe, cloud-based, virtualized or Citrix-hosted applications - without modifying the original applications. All events and associated data can be sent in real-time to Oracle CEP, as well as stored in an Oracle or other central database for analysis using OpenSpan Analytics, Oracle Hyperion or any other BI or reporting tool.

Here is a step-by-step guide to get you started with OpenSpan Events with Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology. Part 1 of this tutorial is going to cover Oracle WebLogic JMS setup.

1. Download and Install Oracle WebLogic 11g R1 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/downloads/index.html)

2. Download and Install Oracle Complex Event Processing 11gR1 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/complex-event-processing/downloads/index.html)

3. Configure Oracle CEP plugin on Eclipse Galileo shipped with Oracle WebLogic 11g R1 (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/doc.1111/e14301/ide_intro.htm#CHDGBGGA)

4. Start your Oracle WebLogic instance (Start Menu > Programs > Oracle WebLogic > User Projects > base_domain > Start Admin Server for WebLogic Server Domain). Wait for the confirmation the server is up and running. You should see a message on the log similar to the following:

<mar 18, 2011 2:58:30 PM EDT> <notice> <weblogicserver> <BEA-000360> <server started in RUNNING mode>

5. Log in to WebLogic Server 11g Administration Console pointing your web browser to http://localhost:7001/console.

6. Click on JMS Modules under Services > Messaging. By default, Oracle WebLogic creates a JMS Module called SystemModule-0. If you don’t have it, you’ll have to create one. Click on SystemModule-0.

7. You also have to create new Queues for the sample configuration where the message exchange between the desktop applications and the Oracle CEP server is going to happen. Click on New and then select Queue. Click Next and give it a name of osevents_SampleQ1. Click Finish. Repeat the process to create another Queue called osevents_SampleQ2.
You also have to create a new connection factory object that's used to create connections for JMS clients. Name your new connection factory object osevents_queue_cf with the same JNDI name.

8. To test your recently created configuration you may want to configure a few JMS clients to send and receive messages to/from these queues. I'd recommend you taking a look on the bottom of the following resource for a pretty nice and straightforward client configuration available at http://redstack.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/a-simple-jms-client-for-weblogic-11g/.

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