Mercury


We are a Mercury Partner

 

Track SOA invocations and responses

GH Tracker is a black-box flight recorder for your TIBCO RV or AE system. Every message is captured from the bus and stored in a database. At any time, the database can be browsed using a powerful graphical user interface specially designed for the purpose.

  • Simplifies root-cause analysis of problems.
  • Ensures business-critical messages can never be lost.
  • Provides extra layer of security as a "back-stop" for Integration Manager processes.
  • Reduces cost by minimising "mean-time-to-repair" on failed messages.
  • Provides valuable audit trail of flow of messages through the entire system.

GH Tracker enables search, repair and playback of individual, or groups of, messages. Intuitive colour-coding visually groups together related messages according to user-defined criteria.

To assist customers with evaluations, GH Tracker now ships with pre-configured interfaces to SQLite, allowing it to function out of the box with little additional configuration - no separate database required!

  • Captures all messages, or a configurable subset.
  • Support for ActiveEnterprise and conventional TIBCO RV messages.
  • Messages can be opened, edited and republished, allowing bad messages to be fixed.
  • Colour-coding to group together messages from a single process.
  • Specialised menu options allow related messages to be rapidly found at the click of a mouse-button.
  • Messages can be replayed, individually or as groups, in real-time or a preset speed, on a different transport if required.
  • Search allows messages to be progressively found through a series of filters, modelling real support processes.
  • Supports common databases (SQLite, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server or MySQL are common).

GH Tracker's advanced features include:

  • Sliding window storage, allowing use on even the busiest systems.
  • Password protection to keep access to information secure.
  • Exchanges data seamlessly with GH Tester, allowing production problems to be examined in a sandbox environment.

GH Tracker in Detail

GH Tracker's purpose is to store messages from the TIBCO bus. Messages can be stored temporarily or permanently. When storing messages temporarily, GH Tracker can act in the same way as an airline flight recorder, keeping a sliding window of messages and automatically deleting those that are too old. Interesting messages may be flagged by a user and will avoid deletion until the user has finished with them.

GH Tracker knows which messages belong to which process flows and uses this information to colour the display. It does this by using the TIBCO Tracking ID code. In this way, messages belonging to the same process are highlighted. Users can easily see which flows have completed successfully and which have not.

Many users can examine messages simultaneously using a client GUI, with their permissions decided by a username and password. These permissions control which messages users can access and which messages, if any, they may republish. Messages can optionally be modified before they are republished.

For speed, GH Tracker uses native libraries to connect to a variety of common databases such as Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server and My SQL. Please contact us for a complete list, as updates are made all the time.

If a system generates a lot of messages, GH Tracker can be used in sliding window mode. In this mode, messages are automatically deleted from the database once they reach a configurable age.

More Detail - Using GH Tracker During the Test Phase

GH Tracker is configured to store all of the messages generated during testing. When a problem occurs, information is already available on all the messages generated at the time, there is no need to go back and recapture additional information. This saves valuable time, and provides all the information necessary, even on occasions when the problem cannot be reproduced easily.

Each of the timings between messages is stored by GH Tracker. This allows performance information to be gained from the system. In particular the timings between process steps in IntegrationManager or BusinessWorks can be seen. This is useful to decide where to spend effort on process optimisation.

More Detail - Using GH Tracker During the Run Phase

As described above, GH Tracker stores groups of messages from the TIBCO bus. In the event of a production failure, the original message that started a process flow, or was sent to an adapter, is held on the system. This message is in the same format as those understood by Green Hat's other tools, so developers can reproduce problems in a sand box environment using GH Tester to publish messages captured by GH Tracker to an adapter with more logging enabled.

It may not be easy to find the message that caused the problem. To help in this process, GH Tracker provides iterative searching capabilities. Support staff and developers can use this to home in on the problem. A typical scenario might be "Customer x with number y cannot access his feature z which was enabled for him about 10:00". Using the pieces of information (x, y and z), support staff can search the GH Tracker database to locate the messages published in relation to this provisioning exercise.

Once the message has been found, it is possible for appropriately permissioned users to edit the message and republish it, thus solving the problem by repairing the broken message. Alternatively, if it was a process definition that caused the problem, that definition can be repaired and the process restarted by republishing the appropriate message.