Cloud Control agent does not deal well with redeployments

Cloud Control Agent shows SCA as down after redeployment




In a lot of environments the development process calls for a daily rebuild of the system. This is typically followed by a (re)deployment of the SCA’s to the Fusion Middleware environment.

In one of my customers environments I had to deal with the issue that each morning the SOA SCA’s were depicted in the Cloud Control as down. A quick check on the server showed them up and running. The same happened in the Enterprise Manager of the server. So the redeployment worked as it should.

So why were the SCA’s noted as down in the Cloud Control when the EM showed them as up? This has to do with the way the agent of the Cloud Control works. The interactive way is described in the following manual: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/install.121/e24215/fmw_discovery.htm

Now when an agent has found an SCA it does not automatically update the lifecycle status of this deployment. So a redeployment does add a new label to a SCA in a partition. The agent seems to be unaware of such a change in the partition and clings to its formerly known label.

Obviously it is disturbing when you look into your Cloud Control dashboard and you find that a (large) number of targets are down.

The Admin Guide shows how to manually update the collection.

In http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/install.121/e24215/fmw_discovery.htm#BABCEADC the process to look for new or modified targets is described. That certainly works if you have only a small environment (say one or two SOA Suite installations) with a low-frequency of redeployments. If you redeploy each night you will need a better approach.

The problem with the automation of this approach is that it is very well hidden (and to my knowledge) not documented.

What you need to do is to go to the domain that contains your deployments. In that summary screen you will see the status (below a screenshot after a manual refresh).

Look at the Date/Timestamp on the page (red circle). If you click on it the following pop-up box will show:

When you check the box next to “Enable Automatic Refresh” you will end with a job that will be editable in the job list. You cannot create such a job in the job section, but you can edit its frequency. The best frequency is to do this right after the nightly deployment run.