MyST has comprehensive support for introspecting existing WebLogic environments so that automated operations can be performed on them such as:
- Automated configuration updates, patching and application release
- Automated Upgrade (e.g. 11g to 12c)
- Migration to the Cloud
- Performing configuration drift checks
- Start/stop/rolling restart operations
- Change visibility, approvals and governance
If you are wanting to perform introspection using MyST Studio, it is recommended to be on version 5.6 and above. If you want to use MyST introspection on a pre-5.6 version, it is recommended to raise a ticket with MyST Support who can help you work through the process and specifically point you to the relevant documentation for your version of MyST.
Introspecting a WebLogic Domain from MyST Studio
You can introspect a Platform Blueprint and/or Platform Model from a WebLogic domain home directly within MyST Studio to bring it under the control of MyST. Details on how to do this are documented here.
It is easiest to introspect directly within MyST Studio rather than via the command-line because it provides a drop-down menu for selecting Compute Definition and the Host to introspect from. At introspection time MyST Studio will directly connect to the host over SSH and discover the Blueprint details from the WebLogic domain.
Introspecting a WebLogic Domain using the CLI
As an alternative to the introspection capability in MyST Studio, there is command-line (CLI) introspection agent that can be ran directly from the Admin Server host. The CLI introspection agent will discover the configuration details from the WebLogic domain and push them directly to MyST Studio for on-going management.
Prerequisites for using the WebLogic Introspection agent
Installing the WebLogic Introspection agent
The WebLogic Introspection agent can be obtained by running the following from the MyST Studio host. docker cp myststudio_web:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/fusioncloud/agent/<File Name> . where <File Name> is one of the following depending on the operating system where you want to run MyST Studio on.
File NameOperating Systemweblogic-introspection-linux-x86_64Linux 64 bitweblogic-introspection-solaris-x86_64Solaris 64 bitweblogic-introspection-solaris-sparcSolaris SPARC
Once you have obtained the file from within the container, you can copy it to any host that you want to introspect from. To make it readily available as weblogic-introspection, you should copy it to a location on the PATH, rename it and ensure it has execute permissions. For example:
scp weblogic-introspection-linux-x86_64 oracle@acme-dev.as.cloud /tmp
mkdir -p /home/oracle/bin
cp /tmp/weblogic-introspection-linux-x86_64 /home/oracle/bin/weblogic-introspection
export PATH=$PATH:/home/oracle/bin
chmod +x /home/oracle/bin/weblogic-introspection
Obtaining the MyST API Key
In order to push discovered data from the command-line introspection agent to Studio, you will need to retrieve and/or regenerate an API key from MyST Studio. This can be performed as follows:
- Login to MyST Studio with an administrator account
- Click on "Administration" then select "Users"
- Under the MySTAdministrator (API User) click on drop-down and select "Show API Key"
- Copy the key, we will use this later. If you want, you can generate a new key at any time.
Obtaining the IDs of referenced resources
When using the CLI Introspection Agent, at times, you may need to provide IDs to reference existing components within MyST Studio. Common use cases for doing this are as follows:
- Customising the Platform Blueprint introspection to reference a specific Compute Definition other than the default one that comes with MyST Studio.
- Customising the Platform Model introspection to reference a specific Environment Type other than the default "CI" environment type that comes out-of-the-box with MyST Studio.
- Ensuring consistency between environments. In this case, you may have a Platform Blueprint and a Platform Model and now want to introspect a different Platform Model but reference the previous Platform Blueprint. For example, if you introspected the Blueprint for Production and now want to introspect the UAT Model while reusing the same Blueprint to ensure consistency of common (non-environment specific) settings with what is in production.
- Advanced customisation to the translation between the WebLogic Domain model and the abstract MyST model which allows the domain to be lifted and shifted.
The ID for a given resource can be obtained from the URL of the resource in MyST Studio. Below are detailed steps for obtaining the ID for given resources
Compute Definition references
Compute Definitions are used to indicate operating system requirements for target hosts in MyST Studio.
You can reuse an existing Compute Definition at introspection time, by referencing it's ID. This can be obtained as follows:
- From the MyST Studio console navigate to Infrastructure > Compute Definition.
- Click on Edit next to the Compute Definition that you want to use and take note of the ID in the URL. The ID is the last part of the URL. For example, if the URL is https://acme-corp.cloud/console/#/compute-definitions/508a8b36-dc15-4252-b95d-9619865866a9 then the ID is 508a8b36-dc15-4252-b95d-9619865866a9
Environment Type references
Environment Types are designed to help categorize Oracle Middleware Platform Instances for governance purposes.
You can reuse an existing Environment Type at introspection time, by referencing it's ID. This can be obtained as follows:
- From the MyST Studio console navigate to Infrastructure > Environment Types.
- Click on Edit next to the Environment Types that you want to use and take note of the ID in the URL. The ID is the last part of the URL. For example, if the URL is https://acme-corp.cloud/console/#/environment-types/2499e11e-7916-4b78-81a8-415cd9f34879 then the ID is 2499e11e-7916-4b78-81a8-415cd9f34879
Infrastructure Provider references
Infrastructure Providers map to a data center or a cloud provider region and typically have a set of associated host, networks, credentials and other related infrastructure resources. When you reference an infrastructure provider at introspection time, MyST will check if the host and credentials exist and if not, it will add them. After introspection, the user can then go in and enter the values (key or password) for the SSH credentials so that environments running on the given hosts can be managed by MyST.
You can reuse an existing Infrastructure Provider at introspection time, by referencing it's ID. This can be obtained as follows:
- From the MyST Studio console navigate to Infrastructure > Infrastructure Providers.
- Click the Infrastructure Providers that you want to use and take note of the ID in the URL. The ID is the last part of the URL. For example, if the URL is https://acme-corp.cloud/console/#/infrastructure-providers/pre-existing/f0ae32b2-b49b-4b23-b23c-9493b2abbea0 then the ID is f0ae32b2-b49b-4b23-b23c-9493b2abbea0
Platform Blueprint references
If you want to introspect a Platform Model on top of an existing Platform Blueprint, you will need to provide the ID of the Platform Blueprint as part of the introspection. This ID can be obtained as follows:
- From the MyST Studio console navigate to Modeling > Platform Blueprint.
- Click on the given Platform Blueprint that you want to use for your model take note of the ID in the URL. The ID is part of the URL. For example, if the URL is https://acme-corp.cloud/console/#/platform-blueprints/c2a9a9c6-4dd6-44b4-8b7a-54a14a235802/1.0.0 then the ID is c2a9a9c6-4dd6-44b4-8b7a-54a14a235802
Introspecting a Blueprint from a WebLogic Domain using the CLI
Once we have the Compute Definition ID that we want to use in our introspected blueprint, we can perform a Platform Blueprint introspection as follows: weblogic-introspection -host <host> -port 443 -key <api_key> -computeId <computeId> <domain_home> If you do not specific the -computeId flag, the agent will use the default Compute Definition that came with MyST Studio.
After introspection, login to MyST Studio and check that the Blueprint exists under Modeling > Platform Blueprints. Now that we have a Blueprint, we can create a new Platform Model based on that and re-provision an identical environment.
Introspecting a Blueprint and Model from a WebLogic Domain using the CLI
As an alternative to introspecting a Platform Blueprint and creating our Platform Model on top of that manually, we can also introspect the Platform Blueprint and its corresponding Platform Model in one go. This approach is especially useful when we want to bring an existing WebLogic Domain under the control of MyST rather than introspecting it to create a copy.
weblogic-introspection -host <host> -port 443 -key <api_key> -model -infra -computeId <computeId> -envId <envId> -infraId <infraId> <domain_home>
Introspecting a Model and reusing an existing Blueprint
If we want to use an existing Platform Blueprint, we just need to provide the ID for the in addition to the other arguments (i.e. set -bpId)
weblogic-introspection -host <host> -port 443 -key <api_key> -model -infra -bpId <blueprintId> -computeId <computeId> -envId <envId> -infraId <infraId> <domain_home>
Performing a Dry Run introspection
We can skip the actual push of an introspection and just test the process, by using the flag -skip-push
Customising the introspection process
If you want to customise the introspection process, you can run the following to extract the XSLT translations to the file system weblogic-introspection -gen This will result in an output similar to the following:
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/config2myst.xslt
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/jdbc2myst.xslt
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/jms2myst.xslt
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/products.json
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/config2model.xslt
Write to /home/oracle/.myst/introspection/product-catalog.json
After this, you can edit any of the XSLT or JSON translators and they will be used as part of the introspection.
If you want to remove your customisations, you can run -clean. This will remove the local files, thus forcing the introspection to use the uncustomised translators on the next introspection. weblogic-introspection -clean
When using introspection customisation from MyST Studio, you will need to make sure the customised XSLT and JSON files exist in ~/.myst/introspection on any host you want to introspect from.
If you have made a customisation that you have found useful, consider submitting it to Rubicon Red engineering for inclusion in an upcoming release.
