Debugging Oracle BPEL process using Sensors in 11g

Sensor is a great feature if you want customise audit trail or debug BPEL processes. The following use case is logging a custom audit message after a transformation BPEL activity has finished, the steps are as follows:

1. Open the composite application

2. Go into your BPEL process

3. Add a new variable called "AuditMessage"

4. Populate value for AuditMessage, in this case I want to set "ReadMessage process step completed successfully." message to the AuditMessage at ReadMessage process step.

5. Change to Monitor View

6. Create sensor at the ReadMessage process step

7. Label the sensor as "ActivitySensor_ReadMessage"

8. Set evaluation time at Completion

9. Create activity variable sensor

10. Create sensor action

11. Sensor is illustrated with an antena icon

12. Save and deploy your composite application

13. Run your composite application
14. Logon to Oracle Enterprise Manager and navigate to SOA Infra

15. Click on the Instance ID

16. Click on the BPEL component

17. Navigate to Sensor Values tab

Further reading:

• Debug logging in BPEL using sensors for 10g by Peter Ebell
• Using Oracle BPEL Process Manager Sensors by Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide

Oracle Fusion Middleware #2

A brief version history:
8i and 8i - The i stands for "Internet" to indicate that 8/9i is "Internet ready".
10g and 11g - The g stands for "grid" to indicate that 10/11g is "grid-computing ready".
11gR2 is the second and terminal release. The common theme for this release is "Consolidate. Compress. Control."

Oracle Corporation has been agressively acquiring best of breed software power house, most recently BEA and Sun Microsystems. What that means for consultants like myself is a rich technology stack for delivering innovative solutions. Software consolidation is still progressing. Here are some tools I was was using this week.

Oracle Weblogic Server:

Oracle Enterprise Manager:

Oracle JRockit Mission Control:

Java VisualVM:

Oracle Fusion Middleware #1

My decision to move to Oracle^® Fusion Middleware because it integrates well with most customer's existing back-office systems.

Over the next few months I am going to take an in depth view of how Oracle SOA Suite is being applied to SOA and Semantic Integration.