TIBCO EMS Central Administration Feature
First of all, this is a my own review comments and view points. This has nothing to do with the organization I work for.
This is a new feature added to TIBCO EMS 7.0. ITIBCO is trying to address in this feature which many of us are facing on a day to day operations and support of TIBCO EMS. The main issue is that suppose you have a multi tier environment setup as per your enterprise standard change management process. Typically we do have development, integration testing, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, pre production environment and production environments through which our changes must pass through to quality through the quality check process. And each of these environments might have their own messaging service setup. Each environments would be having one or more TIBCO domains and each domain could be having multiple TIBCO Enterprise Message Services running. Now to monitor the general health of each EMS service in each domain is a daunting task. Typically how we monitor EMS service is using TIBCO Administrator UI, where the EMS service would have been added through Domain Utility and hence available to monitor and manage. But this is very difficult process if a support person or a EMS standard body in your enterprise is responsible for monitoring even the general health of EMS bus in all environments. (S)he would have to login to each TIBCO administrator UI in each environment/domain and then to manual verification. Very inefficient process.
TIBCO hawk allows us to use TIBCO EMS Hawk Plug-in and monitor the TIBCO EMS servers. But for this, we have to write our own rules, deploy them in each environment/domain as applicable. Then either get the alerts in email or check the alerts in TIBCO Administrator UI, which is available very inefficient process.
There exists a third-party tool, published in TIBCO Community, which is a Java based desktop UI tool, which has the capability to be configured with multiple TIBCO EMS servers and then check their health in one single dashboard. It also allows us to manage the JMS destinations in TIBCO EMS servers. It has out of the configuration rules, which would highlight the health of the EMS servers depending on number of pending messages etc. I like this tool, but it comes with a big warning that it is a unstable tool, and use it at your own risk. Second issue with this tool is, you have to login to the desktop and open the tool, which means, everybody from the Messaging support group should have access to this box. These are the limitations for this tool. What we are looking here is similar tool but should be accessible over the web.
This is where, I guess, TIBCO EMS Central Administration tool fits in. TIBCO might have tried to address this space of the problem using TIBCO EMS Central Administration tool. It does have a UI which is accessible through web browser. But the requirement is that you TIBCO EMS server has to use JSON based configuration file instead of previous conf files. The JSON configuration feature for EMS is introduced in 7.0, which means previous versions of EMS servers can NOT be monitored by Central Administration tool. We have to upgrade the EMS servers to 7.0 effective immediately if we have to use Central Administration. This is a big limitation. The next issue is that JSON based configuration file for each server is a single big configuration file unlike the conf files, which were modularized and hence they were easy to manage. I am NOT in for one single large configuration file for everything. This means, each time you want to change a small thing you have search the whole big file. Different parts of the configuration might be spread in different part of the JSON config files making it difficult to manage, unless it is controlled tightly. Unlike GEMS dashboard view, where we can easily see the health of all the servers in a single page, in the central administration UI, we have to dig in to each EMS server to discover their health e.g. pending message count. This is not very intuitive design. One of the powerful advantage CA has is that, you can define a rule or configuration change in one central location and then deploy that to all EMS servers simultaneously. But I have not come across that requirement not too often. Nevertheless this is a right move by TIBCO. With little more improvements with UI and dashboard, it is going to be great.
These are some of the initial comments and impressions I got when I reviewed this tool. I might be completely wrong and you can always comment and suggest me good things about this tool if I have missed the point.
