# User Guide

## Usage Scenarios

The Usage Scenarios describe some of the different ways you can use BEA Guardian to find problems before they impact your environment.

### Scenario 1: Development Cycle Evaluations

As you develop an application and migrate from development to quality assurance to production, run an evaluation at each stage. Guardian will help ensure that each phase of your development process is compliant with BEA's best practices.

### Scenario 2: Heavy Load Evaluations

Some signatures are designed to evalute runtime domain settings. Running an evaluation under heavy load can detect the signatures of potential problems that would not otherwise be detected. BEA recommends conducting these evaluations during load and performance testing.

### Scenario 3: Application Update Evaluations

After you update an existing application, run an evaluation to assess the deployment. Guardian will help you find the signatures of any potential problems that could impact your upgrade.

### Scenario 4: Vendor Software Update Evaluations

After you install a new BEA patch, service pack, or upgrade, or install or upgrade new third party software, run an evaluation to identify any signatures that may have been introduced.

### Scenario 5: Post Repair Evaluations

If Guardian earlier detected a signature and you made a change to resolve the problem, run an evaluation to confirm that the signature is no longer detected and no new signatures were introduced.

### Scenario 6: Post Domain Change Evaluations

If you made changes to your domain configuration or settings, run an evaluation to confirm that the result is compliant with BEA's best practices.

### Scenario 7: Scheduled Overnight Evaluations

If you're concerned about domain settings being incorrectly changed overnight, or your domain approaching certain resource limits, schedule evaluations to run overnight. You can review the Evaluation Summary in the morning and decide if any detected signatures merit further investigation.

### Scenario 8: Heartbeat Evaluations

Guardian evaluations are designed to have as minimal impact on throughput and CPU usage as possible. If your domain has extra capacity, you can schedule Guardian to run evaluations at regular intervals, for example, every 15 minutes. Then, if any changes are made or certain thresholds are reached, you can be quickly notified.

### Scenario 9: Diagnostic Evaluations

When you notice a problem on your domain, run an evaluation. Even if an earlier evaluation detected no signatures, something may have changed since then to cause the problem observed. Guardian can be your first line of defense in diagnosing and repairing domain problems you observe.

#### Related Concepts

- Evaluation
- Domain
- Signature

#### Related Tasks

- Evaluate Domain

#### Related Reference

- Evaluation Summary

#### Related Getting Started

- Running Scripts