Alexander Hansal, author of the blog Siebel Essentials, wrote the book Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Installation and Management. The Books is written with the role of a system administrator in mind who has to ramp up quickly on Siebel CRM, focusing on typical tasks such as installing and managing the Siebel CRM infrastructure. The publisher, Packt Publishing, sent me a free copy and asked me to write a review for this book. I will try to read the 572 pages in the next few weeks and come back with a review here and on amazon.com.

You can have your own preview here.

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A last one to conclude this series of Siebel CRM monitoring framework articles. Just to show how relative simple it is to build your own custom Siebel monitors. Every active user accessing Siebel using the web client interface has a session which is maintained by a dedicated Siebel task. These sessions are listed in the Server Session view on the Server Administration Screen. In this screen you can see that every session has a unique task identifier. When selecting the State Value detailed view all state values belonging to the task associated with the session are shown. If the session belongs to a Siebel Object Manager, one of the state values is View Name containing the name of the current Siebel view. The Business Components associated to the views are SA-VBC Session and Server Task State Value. By querying all active session in Business Component SA-VBC Session and counting the number of views per view name in Business Component Server Task State Value you get a aggregated list of all active views.

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Active Siebel multithreaded components like the SRBroker or ObjectManager usually consist of multiple MultiThreaded Servers (MTServers) and Tasks to handle multiple simultaneous requests or Siebel sessions. More common naming for a Siebel is a MTServer is processes, which is typically independent, have a separate address space and can be identified on an operating system by its process id (PID). Siebel Tasks are threads spawned by a process and do run in the same memory space as its parent process. Per multithreaded component the number of minimum, default or maximum processes (MTServers) and threads (Tasks) can be configured by the component parameters. The number of processes and tasks are component parameters, not process or tasks parameters. Important to comprehend is that the actual number of threads is distributed over the instantiated processes.

I have not yet seen a monitor which can monitor the distribution of the Tasks for MTServers and visualize this in a clear way. So therefore i gave it a shot to create one myself.

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In my previous post i introduced a simple monitoring framework for Siebel CRM written in Java. Since it is a framework adding monitors should be a straightforward process. To put it to the test i wrote the Java class SBLWorkflowProcMonitor extending the abstract class SBLMonitor to monitor; the number of workflows in a specific state, average duration of the workflows and the number of completed workflows per time unit.

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I have built some monitoring scripts in Perl and Shell in the past years, of which most needed a lot of code to realize an interface with the application and exception handling functions to catch and process every possible error i could think of. In other words, it was quite a challenge to get a stable and reliable working monitoring script. Besides that, not every customer had a Perl interpreter installed on their servers or ran Siebel on another platform than Unix (in all its variations). Since most of the scripts do retrieve the information from the Siebel server manager, i questioned myself if there was not a better way to develop siebel monitors. Monitors which could retrieve information from Siebel using an API instead from wrapper scripts around command-line utilities. Java is more generic available on any platform and Oracle offers a SiebelDataBean which enables to interface with Siebel CRM. So i gave myself the challenge to design and develop a small monitoring framework to monitor the Siebel CRM application which should be easily extendible.

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Since the release of Siebel 8.1.1.1 and BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 a new security model is introduced in BI Publisher, Siebel Security. When using the Siebel Security model, BI Publisher relies on Siebel for its authentication and authorization. Siebel employees can be authorized to generate reports by assigning them the necessary responsibilities. Oracle officially only supports the Siebel Security model when using DB Security for Siebel and the use of the BI Publisher LDAP security model when using LDAP Security Adapter for Siebel. In fact Oracle names the combination of Siebel LDAPSecAdpt with BI Publisher Siebel Security model a 'mixed authentication method' and has not certified and/or validated this method yet. The BI Publisher LDAP Security model has one disadvantage, it requires hardcoded LDAP Security Groups like XMLP_DEVELOPER. Groups names like these probably do not follow your company naming standards for LDAP objects and are therefore not allowed. If so this immediately makes BI Publishers LDAP Security Model not suitable for implementation in your production environment. If you have a better understanding of how the
Siebel Security model works, it is fairly simple to implement this security model when using the LDAPSecAdpt for Siebel.

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In Siebel 8.1.1.1 and BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 a new security model, Siebel Security, is introduced. In this security model BI Publisher uses the Siebel responsibilities as functional roles. How to deploy this is excellent described in the Blog Siebel Essentials. When the Siebel Security Model in BI Publisher requests the available roles (responsibilities) in Siebel, the username and password of the Siebel administrator and the Siebel user are passed in clear-text in the header and body of the webservice call. It would be more secure when you could make a secure (HTTPS) webservice call to your Siebel Web Server. This article describes how you can achieve this.

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The log-adapter project was initiated because a company where i was working on a project, decided that application and system log-files should conform to their newly defined standard. Reasoning behind this was that defining, IBM/Tivoli TEC, log-file formats and corresponding rulesets for each type of application was costly due to complexity of developing, and managing (-procedures) of those rules, formats and adapters. Due to this complexity the time between request and implementation of a new log-file adapter could be weeks or months. By implementing one standardized logfile-format and rule-set the time between requests and implementation of monitoring new log-files could be considerably shortened. This standardization of logfile-monitoring decreased the lead time of implementation requests for the department responsible for monitoring, but charged other departments with the challenge to standardize their application and system logs. Many applications and systems do not allow you to modify how content is written to log-files. This log-file adapter allows you to filter and transform messages from multiple (multi-line) log-files on several systems into one standardized logfile.

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In large Siebel environments, a specific function or component is mostly dispersed over multiple physical or logical systems. The load over these systems is then distributed using a load balancer to make it transparent to the end-user or any other application. The challenge for the administrator here is to keep the systems synchronized, otherwise the function or application will behave randomly. When having Siebel components installed on multiple systems, compverify.pl can help you out to detect differences and synchronize component parameters between multiple Siebel systems. Another useful application of compverify is making snapshots of component parameters and store those for future reference.

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How to monitor Siebel user sessions based on TCP connections

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Tags: Monitoring, Siebel

How to monitor Siebel component tasks in Siebel

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Tags: Monitoring, Siebel

A monitor for detecting runaway processes.

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Tags: Monitoring, Siebel

A monitor to detect the number of successful logins into the Siebel application over a specified interval.

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Tags: Monitoring, Siebel

Deliver restricted access to the Siebel servermanager (srvrmgr) to many users or applications, e.g. Mercury BAC or MAM, without installing the srvrmgr utility by sharing one srvrmgr session.

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