Thinking of WebSphere 6 supportability features

The news of IBM releasing the next version of WebSphere real soon now are propagating through the websites. As a Weblogic support person, it was interesting for me to see what new supportability features were included by IBM. Unfortunately, the details are very vague.

From the general description (failover, failure detection and recovery, etc), it sounded like the features we already had in Weblogic for a while. Some we even had for a very long while (e.g. WLS 6.1 proxy plugin that supports smart failover).

However, I did find one article that provided more serious details.

Specifically,

• ClassLoaderViewer
  
• Hang Detection code in 5.03, 5.1.1 and 6.0
  
• LeakBot for memory leak detection
  
• Session Data Crossover detecton facility in 5.03, 5.1.1 and 6.0
  
• Connection Leak detection
  
• ThreadAnalyzer for deadlock debugging
  
• Event Alerter for notification
  

Some of the items above Weblogic already has. JDBC leak detection was there for a long time; deadlock detector of sorts is built into latest JRockit and there are several free standing tools; event alerter is possible via JMX, SNMP or custom loggers, etc.
Others, we probably should look into.

I will not open any secrets by saying that BEA has recently started to pay serious attention to supportability of its products with Dev2Dev utils, support patterns and new support seminars. Even more interesting announcements in this area should come out soon.

However, seeing IBM to put some real effort into supportability area may spur yet more effort from BEA side and will not do any harm to either companies The real benefits will of course be reaped by system administrators and operations staff.

Long live the healthy competition. As long as we win. :-)

BlogicBlogger Over and Out