The use of Modeler and Monitor

Hi all,

I am interested to hear from other people about their expierences with the use of the modeler and monitor. I never recommend it to customers because it is too slow and buggy. But this was for 6.1. Maybe it has improved in 6.5? I always recomment to build an own error handling and monitoring framework. I put this subject under architecture because it is on architecture decision to use the modeler or not.

Thanks, Rob

“I always recomment to build an own error handling and monitoring framework”…I would say its re-inventing the wheel when the same exists using Modeler/Monitor…Ofcourse it will be additional burden to license Modeler/Monitor components …(MyWMS portal now in 6.5 replaces old IS Monitor with lot of enhancements as well performance and includes Portal,Optimize/BAM,Manager,Servicenet monitoring service management all in one place)…Just few thoughts…Other users will elaborate you with more in details…

-RMg.

I worked with a company that used Modeler/Monitor extensively. A key discovery was keeping the PRT tables trimmed down, otherwise performance deteriorated (PRT clobbered the DB server). The framework they established around Modeler and the PRT worked well. The UI for checking status and doing reprocessing was okay for IT’ers but they didn’t like the UI for business users and the privileges required to do anything within Monitor weren’t granular enough.

I don’t know if I’d characterize MywM as having any enhancements. IMO, it’s a repackaging of the same ol’ stuff–and some would argue, myself included, that the repackaging was a turn for the worst.

Bottom line: I don’t go out of my way to recommend looking at Modeler/Monitor, but I don’t shun it entirely either.

My issue with MwS is that it has a large footprint and can only talk to one IS instance. In my opinion there are a lot of benefits to a distributed architecture however distribution becomes cumbersome and difficult when there are lots of moving parts with large footprints. MwS makes it difficult to architect IS instances in a distributed fashion.

A common solution to this problem is to use one database instance to handle all of the monitoring traffic. To me this has limitations and reduces some of the benefits of distribution mainly around isolation and loose coupling.

I think other vendors have figured out how to attached to multiple instances (JVMs) of their products without having to tie them together. I know for sure webSphere has.

Of course then there is the whole install and configuration of MwS. :eek:

I Think, we need to very thoughtful before selecting Modeling. I have used modeler in couple of place and have found it over head and un necessory…

I think we should use modeler only if…

Business process is long running.
Busniess user need visibility of process, i.e. at what stage process is…
Business needs capability to start,stop,suspend or restart process from any given step business process.

If any of above question is yes then only we should use Modeler… User of Modeler for Logging and monitoring is clear over head… Thats just my thoughts…:slight_smile:

We have found that the magority of our production issues are around Modeler and Monitor. Our integrations (IS’s) not using these components are far more stable, to the point where we’re thinking about rewriting the integrations to get away from the models. We’re in the process of implementing the new MWS and I have been unimpressed so far. I think the concept is great but I wouldn’t refer to MWS as a step up. At least not with the current version.

I did use the Modeler and Monitor at different places. It seemed for us very nice to have those there to have the debugging and processing going smoothly. We had some connectivity problems with in the process which we used to resolve by resubmitting in the modeler.

In my opinion it is nice to have those if the client have a need and can afford.

Thanks,
KVReddy

The MwS-based Broker and BrokerJMS administration pages that shipped with Broker 6.5.2 are very handy and are an improvement over having separate WmBrokerAdmin and WmJMSAdmin tools.

The pages allow you to use a single MwS instance to manage multiple broker servers or JMS JNDI naming directories. However, the UI is a bit confusing when used to do this and it seems that you have to keep selecting the Broker Server that you want to work with as this often gets lost when switching portlets from one function to the other.

The ability to customize a home page to display your most frequently used admin portlets is very useful, but not all portlets will add successfully (e.g. the JNDI Naming Directories portlet appears, but displays no data) and I think you have to know too much about Portal development to really get the most out of this concept.

Most broker and JMS admin portlets now have the ability to create custom filters and sort orders and many allow you to copy and paste from one broker server or broker to another. There are still a few kinks in the copy/paste feature, but once it matures, this will be a great help.

You can definitely see the potential of using MwS for administrative tasks, but I’m not ready to switch completely. To paraphrase the anti-gun control bumper sticker “You can have my IS Administrator when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Mark

I have been using Modeler and Monitor for the past 2 years and I have say that the concept is very good and it helped us present the solution to the user really well. I can say that modeler has improved a lot from 6.0.1 to 6.1 to 6.5.1. I have make a reservation for Monitor though.

I agree with KV that we should only use it where it is required, I have seen it in places where they would use it because they have it and I call it over engineering and thats where the problems start.

I was not impressed with WmMonitor to MyWebMethods. The concept is very good but the introduction was really bad. All of a sudden you loose one of the main method and the users are not informed well and the initial verions of MWS was buggy.

But now we have got used to it and it seems to be working fine so far.

I have not got a change to play around with the new webMethods release but read about it, and it is very promising especially moving the WmBrokerAdmin and WmJMSAdmin packages to MWS.

Cheers,
Ram Challuri

Well, i see a lot of inputs about MyWS above. Though i haven’t got a chance to work on it until now, i feel so-so about it right now. May be, once i get a chance to work on it, i can post some of MY opinions too. Anyways thanks for sharing all your thoughts.

Hope