Backing up and Restoring Business Transaction Management

Before You Back Up

Business Transaction Management operates in a complex environment. For this reason, before backing up, it is important to make sure that you can isolate Business Transaction Management components and that you can identify any other systems that might be affected by the backup and recovery process. Consider issues like the following:

• Databases might be shared with components other than Business Transaction Management. Unless the problem is database failure itself, it is important to restore only those database instances that are used by Business Transaction Management.

• Recovery might affect other systems. For example, if Business Transaction Management shares JDBC drivers with other applications, recovery might restore a driver to a previous version and cause other applications using the driver to fail.

Testing the Backup and Recovery process

You should test your backup process periodically by attempting a recovery and making sure the system can be brought up to the desired state with no side effects. Identifying and resolving problems with the backup process will ensure successful recovery when recovery matters. Your backup verification checklist should include things like the following:

• database and file system structure, and permissions are as expected

• Business Transaction Management is functional and in the expected state: the console shows everything is running, services are reachable, traffic flows normally, and so on.

• no application sharing the same resources is adversely affected.

How Business Transaction Management Data Is Organized

The next figure shows the various kinds of Business Transaction Management data and the Business Transaction Management system services that rely on this data.

With reference to the figure, the basic principle of backing up data is as follows:

• All data contained in databases is backed up by backing up the database.

• All data contained in files or directories is backed up by backing up the btmstorage directory, which can be found on every host where one of the Business Transaction Management system services or monitors is deployed. The location of this directory for your server is specified in Backing up Business Transaction Management Data.

The rest of this section provides more information about elements shown in the previous figure. You do not need to know this level of detail just to do backup and recovery. But this detail might be helpful in troubleshooting and in understanding the resources used by Business Transaction Management. If you want, you can skip ahead to Backing up Business Transaction Management Data.

As the figure shows, Business Transaction Management is composed of multiple system services:

• The sphere, responsible for the overall operation of Business Transaction Management and coordination of its member services

• The SLM service, responsible for gathering performance measurements

• The ExM service, responsible for transaction management

• Monitor agents, responsible for collecting data from observers

Each of these services depends upon data that specifies the system's configuration, describes what it is monitoring, and records the state of monitored applications. This data can be grouped into the three categories shown in the figure.

• Definitional metadata is stored in two places and contains the following information:

  The Sphere database contains data that describes Business Transaction Management as well as the monitored user systems. It includes a description of the users' applications, the policies used to monitor them, and transaction definitions.

  Monitor agent configuration files contain data that describes whether and how each user endpoint is being monitored.

• Operational data is the information Business Transaction Management gathers about user applications: performance and behavioral metrics, logged messages, transaction instances, and generated alerts. This information is stored in the Measurement, Transaction, and Agent Message log databases shown in the figure.

• System configuration data controls the basic behavior of Business Transaction Management: what databases it connects to, the address a container should use to connect to the sphere, default GUI views and layout. This information is saved in various configuration files: initial configuration data, GUI customization, setup data, container registration, and miscellaneous configuration files.

Backing up Business Transaction Management Data

Backing up Business Transaction Management is fairly simple: you back up data contained in databases by backing up the respective database; you back up data contained in files or directories by backing up the btmstorage directory.

The btmstorage directory can be found on every host where one of the Business Transaction Management system services or monitors is deployed at this location:

WebLogic_InstllDir/user_projects/domains/MyDomain/servers/MyServer/btmstorage

Once you have backed up the databases and the btmstorage directory, you are done with the backup process.

In general it is best to back up and recover all data, even if only a subset of your data has been damaged or lost. However, if you would like a more detailed understanding of the individual components used by Business Transaction Management, see Data Storage Reference.

Timing Backups

The timing of backups is important: you should back up the databases and the btmstorage directory as close together in time as possible. If possible, follow these guidelines:

1. Quiesce the system if possible.

2. Back up the btmstorage directories.

3. Back up the databases, with the Sphere data last.