Introducing UConsole and UTerm

UltraESB has a lot of built in management and monitoring capabilities, for the user to select on there preference. All these options how ever goes via the raw Java Management Extension (JMX) interface. In other words the complete management and monitoring aspect of UltraESB is exposed only via JMX, while it has many mechanisms to connect to this interface. Those mechanisms are as follows;

1. JMX management tool like JConsole
2. UConsole
3. UTerm
4. Zabbix monitoring
5. Invoking JSON/REST administration services.

While the use of JConsole to manage the UltraESB runtime has been briefly illustrated in the previous section, this section introduces the UConsole and Uterm. The Zabbix monitoring and JSON/REST service layer will be discussed under the Configuration and Administration and the JSON Management Service reference guide, respectively.

UConsole and Uterm - Brief Introduction While this section very briefly introduces the users into the UConsole and UTerm, a descriptive introduction and a reference guide is available under the respective documentation on Ultra Console and Ultra Terminal.

Ultra Console (UConsole)

UConsole is the web based management console of the UltraESB, which is shipped in with the standard binary distribution. This sub section introduces the UConsole and it shows the usage of UConsole manage the UltraESB instance.

Starting the UConsole is just a matter of running the uconsole script found in the bin directory of the ULTRA_HOME installation directory.

On Linux systems navigate to the "bin" directory of the installation home and execute the "uconsole.sh" script to start the UConsole.

On Windows based systems, navigate to the "bin" directory with the windows explorer and double click on the "uconsole.bat".Upon executing the UConsole start-up script you will be able to see the following log on the command line console.

As the log statement on the above log says, you can point your favourite web browser to the URL https://localhost:8043/uconsole to access the UConcole. You will get to the login page and the following steps will log you into the UConsole.

1. Select the "Local instance" radio button and check to see whether the drop down has something like "localhost (XXXX)" selected.
2. Type-in the default administrator username, "admin" in the Username field.
3. Type-in the default administrator password, "admin" in the Password field.
4. Click on the "Sign In" button to login to the UConsole

Upon logging in you will be directed to the "Dashboard" page of the UConsole, where you can see few gadgets with information on the UltraESB runtime. On the left navigation menu, you can find the management of nodes, clusters and monitoring top level menu structure with the sub menu items within them for managing and monitoring the UltraESB instance or a cluster.

As our focus for this exercise is on the echo-proxy service, lets navigate to the proxy services page with following instructions.

1. Click on the "Node Management" top level menu to expand it.
2. Click on the "Proxy Services" sub menu item.

 
When you click on the "Proxy Services" the console content pane will give a list of available proxy services, in a tabular format, as follows;

Now, if you click on the ID column link of any proxy service, you will be directed to the service information page. In the same manner, you can navigate to the sequences and endpoint destination pages with the available links on the relevant columns. Finally you can see the set of controls available on the right most column, where these controls change with the state of the proxy service. Since both these proxy services are are in Started state, you can Stop or Enable Debug for those proxy services.

Click on the stop icon of the echo-proxy to stop the proxy service. Upon invoking this action you will see the following confirmation box and click OK to confirm that you want to stop the proxy service.

Once the action is confirmed, it will be invoked and you will see an information box stating whether the stop action was successful or not. Click on the OK button of the information box, and you will be able to see that the state of the proxy service getting changed from Started to Stopped, and the controls changes accordingly as follows;

You may send a message to the echo-proxy proxy service with the SOA Toolbox as described in the previous section on Sending a Message through UltraESB to verify the proxy service has stopped.

UConsole is capable of offering all the management and monitoring requirements for the UltraESB individual instances as well as clusters and this section just introduced you to the usage of the UConsole, please follow the Ultra Console documentation on a complete guide to working with UConsole.

Ultra Terminal (UTerm)

UTerm is the command line management client of the UltraESB, which is shipped in with the standard binary distribution. This sub section introduces the UTerm and it shows the usage of UTerm to manage the UltraESB.

Starting the UTerm is just a matter of running the uterm script found in the bin directory of the ULTRA_HOME installation directory.

On Linux systems navigate to the "bin" directory of the installation home and execute the "uterm.sh" script to start the UTerm.

 

Upon executing the above script the uterm prompt displays on the command line as follows;

With this UTerm has entered into the interactive mode of operation, and provided that the UltraESB instance is running locally you can now interact with the UltraESB instance.

Note While this introduction uses the "Interactive mode" the UTerm is available in "Scriptable standalone mode" too, which will be useful in automated management with scripts. Further, if you want to manage a remote UltraESB instance you can use the "connect" command or the --server option to specify the connecting UltraESB instance. Follow the complete UTerm manual for more information on advance UTerm usages.

With the UTerm you can use the list proxy services (lps) command to list all the available proxy services of the connected (in this case locally running) UltraESB instance.

Here, you will only see the "echo-back" proxy service, as the "echo-proxy" proxy service is stopped with the previous UConsole action.

List proxy services command defaults  List proxy services (lps) command by default lists the proxy services in the "Started" state. In order to list all proxy services use the "-a" option

So lets use the "-a" option to list all the proxy services.

Now we want to see which proxy services are started and running, and which are not. So lets include another option "-s" to print the state of each and every proxy service, while listing.

Here you can see the echo-proxy is stopped and the echo-back is started. To get the complete information listing, as in the UConsole table, use the "-i" option instead of "-s".

To start the proxy service "echo-proxy" that is being stopped with the UConsole the start proxy service (strps) command can be used.

Now if you list the services with there states you will be able to see that the "echo-proxy" is in started state.

You may verify that the proxy service is running by sending a message to the proxy service with the SOA Toolbox as described in the previous section on Sending a Message through UltraESB.

Capabilities of UTerm are much more than what has been discussed in this introduction and it is used to manage a complete cluster gracefully with just one command and so forth. Please follow the Ultra Terminal documentation for all the commands and options available with UTerm.