You will need to install Oracle SOA Suite and the Hyperic HQ server and agents for this recipe. Both Hyperic HQ and Oracle SOA Suite will need to be running. You will also need the login credentials for the Hyperic HQ console.

These steps will show us how to monitor the CPU usage of our SOA Suite platforms:

The Hyperic agent uses the SIGAR library to collect metric data related to operating systems, including the CPU usage. This data is sent by the agent to the Hyperic server, which stores it in the database. We can then use the Hyperic console to browse this information.

When monitoring the CPU usage, we obviously look to ensure that the system is not running at 100 percent CPU usage, which implies that there is a performance problem somewhere in the system. CPU usage is a good metric to set alerts on, because it should not be high in normal circumstances, and it is always worth investigating the incidents of high CPU usage.

As with monitoring JVM memory usage, having a good understanding of what your CPU usage pattern usually looks like can be very useful for diagnosing an abnormal behavior. For example, many organizations have an anti-virus or batch process that runs overnight or during quiet periods, which can use significant amount of the CPU when running. If you are not aware that this is a normal behavior, it can be easy to mistake it for the cause of a performance problem, and waste significant time looking for a CPU bottleneck, where the true performance bottleneck is elsewhere.