Chapter 11. Monitoring with Mule
In this chapter
- Using standard tools to monitor Mule instances
- Strategies for auditing the ESB
- Building human-friendly dashboards
Whether you use Mule to bridge systems together or to directly expose services, business activities and processes throughout your company will soon rely on the availability of your Mule instances. As an intermediation tier, it’s common for Mule to become a critical actor in the IT landscape. In chapter 7, we reviewed different approaches for running Mule in an highly available manner. In this chapter, we’ll look at another important aspect of running Mule in production: monitoring. The ability to trigger alerts before end users or business processes start to suffer is an immediate benefit of monitoring. But it also helps on other related topics such as SLA enforcement, operational reporting, and audit trail (for legitimate or unauthorized activities).
In the coming sections, we’ll review different aspects and techniques involved in monitoring Mule instances. We’ll first consider the need to perform health checks on these instances. We’ll then look at the different options available to track the activity that occurs in these instances. And we’ll close with a mention of dashboards, the human-facing part of monitoring. While doing so, we’ll look at the different ways Clood, Inc., monitors its applications and those of its clients, including the particular web dashboard they’ve created.