# User Guide

## Signature

BEA Support has identified patterns in user domains that can cause problems. These patterns are described in XML documents called signatures.

Signatures describe potential problems based on information about your BEA WebLogic servers and the environment in which they are deployed, including Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), operating systems, and databases. Signatures can identify specific versions of these products as well as their configuration settings.

In addition to the potential problem description, signatures also contain a remedy recommendation and a severity level: 1-Critical, 2-Warning, or 3-Info.

To detect signatures in your domain, you conduct an evaluation. When the evaluation is complete, the results are displayed in the Evaluation Summary. The Evaluation Summary lists all the signatures detected with their severity level, description, and remedy recommendation.

The signature is the critical component of BEA Guardian because it contains the distilled knowledge of BEA Support for both detecting potential problems and resolving them.

#### Related Concepts

- Domain
- Evaluation
- Bundle

#### Related Tasks

- Evaluate Domain
- Update Guardian

#### Related Reference

- Signature Explorer
- Signature Details
- Signature Log File
- Evaluation Summary