Working with Oracle Managed File Transfer
The first thing you see is the Oracle Managed File Transfer Monitoring dashboard.
The dashboard has four sections: Deployment, Transfer Instances, Source Instances, and
Target Instances.
Let's look at the deployment section of the MFT dashboard.
Here is a bulk order transfer entry. When I select it, you can see some information
about deployment, such as it was deployed twice and it has runtime dependencies on the
bulk order FTP source and the file target.
With the entry selected, you can do things such as undeploy or disable the deployment.
If I click disable, it asks for some comments. I can disable this transfer temporarily. You
would do this if you know a point will be down for some reason.
I don't want to disable it, so I will click No.
Back at the MFT dashboard, I will look at the Metrics pane, which you can reach by clicking the Dashboard link. And I will select the metrics
for the last week.
Here is a view of all transfers that happened in the specified time period.
This shows the transfer artifacts and not the sources and targets.
You can see the most active transfers here, and this is useful if you want to see what
is taking up a lot of resources.
You can see the payload file size, the transfer speed, and the total transfer time; average,
minimum, and maximum.
So using this dashboard is a good way to see what percentage of transfers are failing or
succeeding. Additionally, there is a Recent Error section that is like an audit log.
I will click one to bring up the Instance Flow Report.
There are details available in this Instance flow report. The icons here show that the
target has failed, and the associated transfer and source are in a warning status. The details
show the cause of the failure and a suggested action. This shows a SOA target failed. This
report is where diagnosis or root cause analysis is exposed.
Looking back at the dashboard, we have a component called File Finder where you can see recent
transfers. You can filter and search for files that start with MFT. This file entry shows
its status and that it successfully completed. The source goes back to the same report that
shows the file name, where it lives, the source name, status, and endpoint location of where
it came in. You see that this came in from an FTP server. These are the transfers that
are associated with it. This is more advanced information about IDs, such as the user who
sent it.
Next I will choose a file to transfer. For this example, I used a Firefox FTP client,
but Oracle MFT supports a standard FTP client or a secure FTP client like SSH or sFTP.
It is important to note that MFT uses the WLS Security layer (OPSS) and Oracle Identity Management, so the MFT FTP users can be mapped to LDAP. Most FTP servers authenticate using standard operating system user permission, which can be a serious security issue.
I have a folder that is set up for the transfer. Notice that the file name is an .xml.pgp.zip file.
The transfer looks at all files with a *.zip filter, and it uncompresses the file
and then decrypts the file. The resulting transferred file will be an XML file.
Now that the file is transferred, let's look at the Active Deliveries section. You can
see the two different targets: SOA target and File target.
The end-to-end flow of sending files to two different endpoints is called Fan Out.
If I click on the SOA target, I can see information about the target instance. This shows the
location, the endpoint, and there is a target Prepocessing section that shows the file was
decrypted. You can see this xml file is what was sent across.
Now I'm looking at the SOA Suite Fusion Middleware control to see the SOA composite. You can
see the flow trace and the payload content. The payload shows the MFT WSDL contract which
has an FTP reference. Instead of sending a large file as an attachment or inline, you
can send an FTP reference which makes it very small. You can create BPEL processes faster
and uses less memory. The BPEL process would take that entire message and dump it into
the database in case it had to restart and go back to a checkpoint in a BPEL process.
By keeping this small, restart is trivial to do.
There is a lot of information in the payload file such as a header, filename, filter used,
file size, user who uploaded the file, link back to MFT console, and more metadata that
helps with decision making, such as manual task approval.
In the Instance view, the Flow trace shows the managed file transfer. Clicking the MFT
link takes you back to the console that shows the origin of the file. The fan out symbol
shows the File Target and SOA Target. The Summary shows an audit trail of the file.
The File Target shows the actions associated with it and is like an audit trail. It doesn't
show the actions like decompress and unencrypt. The files reside in the file system and the
audit trail exposed in the console is stored in the database.
The Post Transfer Notification shows that an email was sent. I can check my email and
see that the email has things such as the file name, user, file size, source name like
a partner name, timestamp, and there is a detail link that takes you to the report.
So you can view the source from a SOA composite, a BPEL process, or an email. Clicking the
Source Transfer link shows the two target deliveries: File Target and SOA Target.
Back at the dashboard, the Source instances is a summary of all actions and shows the
most active sources and source statistics, and you can filter the data. You can use this
to identify your most active resources. The graphs and numbers are clickable links, so
you can drill down to see the reports for more detailed information.
The Target Instances gives you similar information. So you can see the most active target, status
and error ratio, metrics associated with the payload file size, and more. You get a list
of instances here. The Type column shows that this is sent to an FTP target, and this one
was sent to a web service.
In the left navigation tree, you can filter the list. It shows you a report of all instances
of the transfer, such as the Bulk Order Transfer. It drills down to individual files. I can
see the transfer and FTP source. I can see all instances of the system going through
that source. I can page through multiple pages, I see dependencies, the sources associated
with transfer and similar metrics. So, we have coarse grained metric in dashboard but
also the ability to look all the way to individual sources. This is a really good reporting feature.
So that's how you use Oracle SOA Managed File Transfer.