WebSphere Extended Deployment, Version 6.0.x
             Operating Systems: AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Windows, z/OS


Operational policies

WebSphere Extended Deployment uses policy-driven goals to achieve a healthy and robust performance goals environment. Operational policies consist of service policies and health policies. The service policy provides the ability to differentiate applications according to their perceived level of importance and target values. The health policy identifies conditions to watch for and provides the ability to act on these conditions to ensure a healthy environment.

Service policy

WebSphere Extended Deployment provides the ability to differentiate applications according to a defined goal that includes target values and an associated importance. You define this goal with a service policy. A service policy has one goal and a collection of transaction classes. Each transaction class belongs to exactly one service policy. Application Universal Resource Identifiers (URI) are mapped to a service policy using work classes. A work class maps to a specific transaction class so that it knows what service policy business goal to follow. You can add a rule condition to a work class to further classify its workload by more specific criteria.

Different service policies can have different kinds of goals. The discretionary goal has no associated value or importance. An average response time goal has an associated response time threshold and importance, whereas a response time percentile goal has two associated values; percentage and time, and an importance.

A queue time goal is available for long-running applications.

Service policies are assigned response time, throughput or utilization targets that are valid for specified throughput conditions. The performance management done by the autonomic request flow manager, the dynamic workflow manager and the application placement controller achieves a defined balance of the performance results. The defined balance among nondiscretionary flows is achieved by either having the flows all under threshold by the same relative amount, expressed as a fraction of the threshold, or by exceeding the threshold by a relative amount that is inversely proportional, 100 - importance. The discretionary flows are given a minimal allocation.

A performance goal strategy requires a monitoring capability by the autonomic manager to determine whether specified performance goals are met, and a reporting capability to notify a provisioning module when changes are required. Furthermore, to account for the case when it is impossible to satisfy all performance goals, it is possible to assign a business value to each performance goal. Administrators must have an in-depth understanding of deployed applications so that they can create realistic performance goals.

Health policy

A health policy works much the same as the service policy, except that the health policy provides a health goal for the environment. A health policy consists of a health condition and a health action. A health condition specifies a problematic scenario in your environment. If this scenario occurs, the specified health action runs to make the condition better. You can specify a health policy to monitor different targets, such as a dynamic cluster or a server. Servers can be simultaneously monitored by multiple health policies. Armed with a set of conditions to look for, WebSphere Extended Deployment monitors the environment until a problem is detected, and action is taken.




Related concepts
Health management
Work classes
Related tasks
Configuring the health management controller
Configuring health management
Deploying applications with defined service levels
Related reference
Routing and service policies work classes
Concept topic    

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Last updated: Nov 30, 2007 3:56:25 PM EST
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