The Enterprise Manager product release parade continues. Oracle just released three new management packs: Management Pack for Oracle WebCenter Suite, Management Pack Plus for SOA and Management Pack for Websphere Portal.
There are several notable things about these packs. First, they are for both Oracle and 3rd party middleware products, continuing our effort to help Oracle customers proactively manage Oracle products and 3rd party technologies often used with Oracle. Second, they leverage the Composite Application Monitoring and Modeler technology that we acquired last year in order to take Enterprise Manager's ability to discover, model, monitor, diagnose and report on the usage of various Java EE and SOA applications and the artifacts that make up these applications.
Additional product information can be found at this website.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/soa_mgmt.html
There is also a very nice recorded demo that shows how the tool works in action, which you may access from this link.
http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/screenwatches/camm/index.html
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
New Management Connectors to Integrate Oracle Enterprise Manager with HP Management Products
One of the most frequently asked questions that our customers ask about Oracle Enterprise Manager is its ability to integrate with other management tools. This is understandable. As good as Enterprise Manager is at managing Oracle database and applications, many IT departments already use other tools for managing their network, keeping track of their storage, and running their helpdesks. Enterprise Manager provides a rich selection of approaches for exchanging data with other tools. These integration capabilities just got better this week with the release of three new connectors, which include:
- Management Connector for HP Service Center
- Management Connector for HP Service Manager
- Management Connector for HP OpenView Operations Manager
These three connectors join a growing collection of similar connectors for integrating Oracle Enterprise Manager with Siebel Helpdesk, BMC Remedy Helpdesk, PeopleSoft Helpdesk, Microsoft Operations Manager and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. They help automate ITIL problem and incident management processes by automatically generating helpdesk tickets, forwarding alerts, and synchronizing status updates bi-directionally.
Because these integrations are done at the Enterprise Manager platform level, they benefit all the different users of Enterprise Manager from DBAs to infrastructure administrators to application administrators. In other words, if you want to use Enterprise Manager to manage Oracle E-Business Suite or Siebel or a Java EE app running in Oracle Weblogic Server, and you still want to use HP tools to carry out other tasks, you can now use these connectors to achieve the integration.
More information about Enterprise Manager's Connectors can be found here.
Read the press release here.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 Platform Enhancements
In my last post, I gave an overview on our new release of Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5. Starting with this article, I am going to cover each area of improvement in more detail. The first topic to discuss is platform enhancements, as aside from Weblogic support, these are the most important changes we made in 10gR5. Platform improvements are important because they benefit everybody. Most of the Enterprise Manager management packs and plug-in's are built on a common platform. This approach allows Oracle to achieve economy of scale when it comes to creating management tools for various technologies, and it provides simplicity and efficiency to our customers as a common platform makes it easier to deploy various tools and reduces training needs.
Here are the key improvements.
Default Monitoring Templates – Monitoring Templates help Enterprise Manager deliver its “grid management” vision of managing a “grid” of objects as a single entity. Specifically, templates can be used to specify common thresholds in order to simplify monitoring setups. Before 10gR5, one could define monitoring templates, but these templates have to be manually applied to new targets that are added to Enterprise Manager. In 10gR5, this step is automated through a default option in monitoring template. If you mark a template as the default for a given target type, then the template would be automatically applied every time you add a new target of this type to Enterprise Manager. In addition, a new out-of-box report and reporting elements make it easier to review template application history.
Improved Alert State Management – Prior to 10gR5, once an alert is raised when a metric threshold is crossed, the alert would stay in Enterprise Manager until the next scheduled evaluation of the metric. This was not very convenient, as administrators want to get more timely feedback on the corrective actions that they take, and have the alert state be cleared as soon as possible. Starting with 10gR5, administrators can force a metric re-evaluation to be carried out immediately in order to verify the effectiveness of the fix. In addition, administrators can better manage their log file based alerts by setting duration based notification rules that clear such alerts on a periodic basis, or by using new EMCLI verbs that support bulk clearing of such alerts.
Repeated Notification – Repeat notifications are now supported for all notification methods – OS Command, PL/SQL procedures and SNMP traps.
Customized Notification Messages – EM 10gR5 provides more flexibility in the way that administrators can customize the format of email notifications. The content of the notification can be customized to include selected target properties and other information that provides more context about the alerts. Considering the multitude of devices that people use to receive notifications and the varying limitations of these devices, having this flexibility to customize the messages should be quite useful.
EM Backup / Recovery via EMCLI – New verbs are added to emcli so that backup and recovery operations for Enterprise Manager components can now be performed via the command line. These operations include the ability to resynchronize the repository, export and import OMS configurations, and resynchronize an agent based on information in the repository. Besides the fact that many power users like to use command line tools, having this command line support enable automation of these operations via scripting.
Management Pack License Bulk Updates – Bulk activation and deactivation of management pack license can now be performed in either the Enterprise Manager console or via emcli. We probably should have added this feature long time ago. After you pay for the packs, the least that we could do is to make it easier for you to start using them. Well, better late then never. :)
Automatic Enterprise Agent Software Download – Grid Control has provided several means to automate the process of deploying agents in the past, but one task has been manual – getting the agent software package from Oracle in the first place! We have automated this step too in 10gR5. Just go to the agent page and pick out what you want and the tool will take care of getting it from My Oracle Support. Yes, this is another long overdue item.
Privilege Propagating Group – Group is one of the most useful platform features of Enterprise Manager. It lets you arrange a set of related targets together so that they can be monitored together more easily. Privilege Propagating Group extends this concept further by simplifying the allocation of access privilege to the set of targets under a group. Once you grant an access privilege to a Privilege Propagating Group, all member targets of that group inherits the same access privilege.
Additional Access Privileges – New fine-grained target privileges to support principle of least privilege are provided: Blackout Target, Manage Target Metrics, Configure Target and Manage Target Alerts. In addition, the Enterprise Manager user interface is enhanced to make it easier to manage Privilege Delegation settings. Privilege Delegation can be set for User Defined Metrics, Corrective Actions and Database Replay features. Lastly, corrective actions that a user defined may be shared with other users by granting them the proper access privileges.
Third Party Security Certificates – EM 10gR5 supports the use of third party security certificates to set up secured communications between the Enterprise Manager's server, agent, and the web browser client.
Enhanced Auditing – EM 10gR5 lets you track Enterprise Manager operations more easily. As Enterprise Manager becomes the tool to manage applications, middleware infrastructure and databases centrally, it is important to be able to trace these operations. Enhanced auditing capabilities include enriched audit records, audit data search, built-in externalization service to externalize audit data into external store, and compatibility with Oracle Diagnostic Logging (ODL) format to allow integration with Oracle Audit Vault.
Simplified User Defined Policy Interface – Configuration Policy is a very powerful feature in Grid Control to help IT proactive about avoiding configuration related problems. Prior to 10gR5, it was very difficult to create custom policies. This problem is solved in 10gR5 with a wizard driven interface to create User Defined Policies, allowing you to mitigate system vulnerabilities by defining and implementing configuration policies specific to their operational best practices, governance and industry standard requirements. The new interface allows you to create, edit, test, delete, export and import user defined policies.
User Defined Policy Group – In addition to be User Defined Policies, you may also defined User Defined Policy Groups to group together user defined and Oracle-provided policies. Once these policy groups are created, they can be evaluated just like other policy groups.
There you have it. These are the key platform enhancements for Enterprise Manager 10gR5, which are applicable whether you are managing your packaged Oracle applications using our Application Management Packs, your middleware infrastructure using our Middleware Management Packs, your Oracle Database using our Oracle Database Management Packs, or 3rd party technologies using our System Monitoring Plug-in's. There is something for everyone!
Here are the key improvements.
Default Monitoring Templates – Monitoring Templates help Enterprise Manager deliver its “grid management” vision of managing a “grid” of objects as a single entity. Specifically, templates can be used to specify common thresholds in order to simplify monitoring setups. Before 10gR5, one could define monitoring templates, but these templates have to be manually applied to new targets that are added to Enterprise Manager. In 10gR5, this step is automated through a default option in monitoring template. If you mark a template as the default for a given target type, then the template would be automatically applied every time you add a new target of this type to Enterprise Manager. In addition, a new out-of-box report and reporting elements make it easier to review template application history.
Improved Alert State Management – Prior to 10gR5, once an alert is raised when a metric threshold is crossed, the alert would stay in Enterprise Manager until the next scheduled evaluation of the metric. This was not very convenient, as administrators want to get more timely feedback on the corrective actions that they take, and have the alert state be cleared as soon as possible. Starting with 10gR5, administrators can force a metric re-evaluation to be carried out immediately in order to verify the effectiveness of the fix. In addition, administrators can better manage their log file based alerts by setting duration based notification rules that clear such alerts on a periodic basis, or by using new EMCLI verbs that support bulk clearing of such alerts.Repeated Notification – Repeat notifications are now supported for all notification methods – OS Command, PL/SQL procedures and SNMP traps.Customized Notification Messages – EM 10gR5 provides more flexibility in the way that administrators can customize the format of email notifications. The content of the notification can be customized to include selected target properties and other information that provides more context about the alerts. Considering the multitude of devices that people use to receive notifications and the varying limitations of these devices, having this flexibility to customize the messages should be quite useful.
EM Backup / Recovery via EMCLI – New verbs are added to emcli so that backup and recovery operations for Enterprise Manager components can now be performed via the command line. These operations include the ability to resynchronize the repository, export and import OMS configurations, and resynchronize an agent based on information in the repository. Besides the fact that many power users like to use command line tools, having this command line support enable automation of these operations via scripting.
Management Pack License Bulk Updates – Bulk activation and deactivation of management pack license can now be performed in either the Enterprise Manager console or via emcli. We probably should have added this feature long time ago. After you pay for the packs, the least that we could do is to make it easier for you to start using them. Well, better late then never. :)
Automatic Enterprise Agent Software Download – Grid Control has provided several means to automate the process of deploying agents in the past, but one task has been manual – getting the agent software package from Oracle in the first place! We have automated this step too in 10gR5. Just go to the agent page and pick out what you want and the tool will take care of getting it from My Oracle Support. Yes, this is another long overdue item. Privilege Propagating Group – Group is one of the most useful platform features of Enterprise Manager. It lets you arrange a set of related targets together so that they can be monitored together more easily. Privilege Propagating Group extends this concept further by simplifying the allocation of access privilege to the set of targets under a group. Once you grant an access privilege to a Privilege Propagating Group, all member targets of that group inherits the same access privilege.Additional Access Privileges – New fine-grained target privileges to support principle of least privilege are provided: Blackout Target, Manage Target Metrics, Configure Target and Manage Target Alerts. In addition, the Enterprise Manager user interface is enhanced to make it easier to manage Privilege Delegation settings. Privilege Delegation can be set for User Defined Metrics, Corrective Actions and Database Replay features. Lastly, corrective actions that a user defined may be shared with other users by granting them the proper access privileges.
Third Party Security Certificates – EM 10gR5 supports the use of third party security certificates to set up secured communications between the Enterprise Manager's server, agent, and the web browser client.
Enhanced Auditing – EM 10gR5 lets you track Enterprise Manager operations more easily. As Enterprise Manager becomes the tool to manage applications, middleware infrastructure and databases centrally, it is important to be able to trace these operations. Enhanced auditing capabilities include enriched audit records, audit data search, built-in externalization service to externalize audit data into external store, and compatibility with Oracle Diagnostic Logging (ODL) format to allow integration with Oracle Audit Vault.
Simplified User Defined Policy Interface – Configuration Policy is a very powerful feature in Grid Control to help IT proactive about avoiding configuration related problems. Prior to 10gR5, it was very difficult to create custom policies. This problem is solved in 10gR5 with a wizard driven interface to create User Defined Policies, allowing you to mitigate system vulnerabilities by defining and implementing configuration policies specific to their operational best practices, governance and industry standard requirements. The new interface allows you to create, edit, test, delete, export and import user defined policies.
User Defined Policy Group – In addition to be User Defined Policies, you may also defined User Defined Policy Groups to group together user defined and Oracle-provided policies. Once these policy groups are created, they can be evaluated just like other policy groups.
There you have it. These are the key platform enhancements for Enterprise Manager 10gR5, which are applicable whether you are managing your packaged Oracle applications using our Application Management Packs, your middleware infrastructure using our Middleware Management Packs, your Oracle Database using our Oracle Database Management Packs, or 3rd party technologies using our System Monitoring Plug-in's. There is something for everyone!
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is Here!
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5 is finally here! I hope you all enjoyed the launch webcast this morning. If you missed it, here is the link to the recording.
As I mentioned in my post last week, this release is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. So what are those goodies? Here are some of the most important enhancements.
For Application Administrators
This release takes Enterprise Manager Grid Control's top-down application management capabilities to the next level. Of all the new and improved features, probably the most significant is our expanded support for the Oracle Weblogic Server. Weblogic support is important because this component serves as the foundation of many Oracle products. Weblogic not only forms the basis of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is the foundation for upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications, but it is also a key technology used to modernize the various packaged Oracle applications. In other words, improved support for Weblogic management benefits not only administrators of custom Java applications, but also administrators of packaged Oracle applications. For example, the latest Siebel CRM 8.1.1 release incorporates Oracle Application Development Framework into its software stack to enable the latest generation of customer self service applications. As Oracle evolves the current packaged applications using Java EE technologies, it is important that the tools for managing these applications are evolved with them.
One thing to keep in mind is that Enterprise Manager's support for Weblogic is not a completely new thing. In fact, Enterprise Manager began supporting Weblogic monitoring in 2006, two years before Oracle acquired BEA. The support was part of Enterprise Manager's heterogeneous management capabilities, which also include support for monitoring Websphere, JBoss and .NET. In 10gR5, Weblogic support was strengthened to include the ability to:
- monitor the performance of top Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) & JSP’s in deployed applications;
- discover and monitor web services deployed to WebLogic Server
- monitor server resources (e.g. data sources, JMS servers, resource adapters, JOLT connection pools)
- view, compare and track more configuration items such as JVM vendor/version, additional tuning parameters, cluster configuration, JMS resources, virtual hosts, JOLT connection pools, and configuration files
For packaged applications, Application Management Pack for Siebel was refreshed to add official support for Siebel 8.1.1, the brand new version of Siebel CRM that Oracle released recently. In the old days, it was always a challenge to get third party management vendors to support new Siebel releases in a timely manner. As the old saying goes – if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. Now that we build our own management tools, we can ensure that our new application releases are covered. In addition to 8.1.1 support, this new release of the Siebel Pack also include Workflow Process Monitoring, Workflow Policy Monitoring, Event Log Analysis, improved Discovery and Application Service Monitoring.
In addition to the updated Siebel Pack, we released new application accelerators for Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). RUEI helps IT monitor actual end user experience, answering important questions such as: Who logged onto the applications? What did the users do? What response time did they get and what sort of errors did they run into? Following the approach that we started with our application management packs to provide tools engineered for specific packaged Oracle applications, our two accelerators – one for Oracle E-Business S uite and one for Siebel CRM, provide out of the box management capabilities for these Oracle applications so that the time to get the tool up and running is reduced.
These three packaged application management improvements are just the first wave of enhanced support for Oracle applications that we are introducing for 2009. Stay tuned for more to come.
In addition to better Weblogic Server support and improved management for Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite, 10gR5 also contains support for Oracle Coherence application grid technology, improved support Oracle Service Bus, BPEL Process Monitoring, Java Application Diagnostics, Composite Application Modeling and Monitoring and Application Configuration Management. There is way too much information to cover in one post, so check out this document for an overview, and come back to this blog for more indepth discussions later on.
For DBAs
Oracle Enterprise Manager started out as a database management tool, and this 10gR5 release should please DBAs who are looking for further improvements to an already impressive package. This release provides support for Oracle Database 11gR1, enabling multiple database servers to be managed centrally. You may wonder – how could 10g Enterprise Manager Grid Control manage 11g Oracle Database? The answer is even though the two products carry similar versioning schemes, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Oracle Database are on different release schedules. Therefore, there is nothing unusual about using Enterprise Manager 10g to manage an 11g Oracle Database.
Some of the key enhancements for Oracle Database Management includes:
- support for 11g database features such as ADDM for RAC, real-time SQL monitoring, partition advisor and automatic SQL tuning;
- database replay – an automatic way to capture product workload, copying it to a test system, setting up the software and the test database to reflect the state of the source system at time of capture, deploying replay clients, orchestrating the replay process, and analyzing the replay results;
- database change propagation – synchronize data dictionary to propagate schema changes from a dictionary baseline or a database to a target database;
- some of these capabilities actually existed in the 9i version of Enterprise Manager and have brought it back with full integration within Grid Control;
- customizable tile based views to monitor waits and other metrics across multiple RAC nodes in a cluster;
- improved performance workflows for cluster cache coherency, historic views, and drilldown;
- service-centric monitoring facilitates the monitoring of workflows and drilldowns for RAC services;
- a new HA Console to monitor overall HA configuration status and initiate operations;
- a Maximum Availability Architecture Configuration Advisor page allows you to evaluate the configuration and identify solutions for protection from computer, site, storage, human and data corruption failures, enabling workflows to implement Oracle Recommended solutions;
- automatic configuring of Oracle-recommended Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) for databases with minimum downtime;
- you can now migrate database to ASM, and convert single instance database to RAC all with minimum downtime using standby technology to minimize downtime;
- a Streams dashboard, along with improved monitoring of streams configurations, allows you to monitor streams components as well as end-to-end paths for Latency and Throughput metrics.
These enhancements help DBAs plan their database changes better by leveraging production workload in order to analyze the potential impact of database changes, make changes more easily by automating the migration of changes, and ensure the database is more robust by implementing leading database maximum availability practices prescribed by Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture guidelines.
For CIOs
For a long time, IT decision makers have had to make important IT decisions on less than perfect information. Worst yet, the information available often did not represent the reality faced by IT's customers – the lines of business. It puts IT at a rather disadvantaged position. With Real User Experience Insight and Enterprise Manager's Service Level Management capabilities, CIO can get much better information to demonstrate the value that IT delivers, and to ask for the needed resources using factual information to back up the requests.
Equally important, the expanding capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control mean that many important IT assets can now be managed better and with fewer resources. IT is always shorthanded, so freeing up resources mean that the CIO now has the flexibility to invest on new projects that his/her counterparts in line of business have been asking for in order to drive the organization forward.
Enterprise Manager's expanding footprint also means that IT departments can move forward with their goals of simplifying their vendor management by consolidating their spending with fewer vendors. Gone are the days when organizations have to go to different vendors to get applications, middleware, development tools, databases, O/S and enterprise management systems.
For Applications' Business Sponsors
While not direct users of Oracle Enterprise Managers, the line of business sponsors of the applications also benefit from all these improvements. For example, Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) can be used by not only IT administrators, but also business analysts to perform click stream analysis in order to understand consumer behaviors on eCommerce and self-service applications, where increasingly amount of business activities are carried out. When the data collected from RUEI is combined with those captured from the business applications and analyzed using tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence, businesses can get unprecedented clarity on business activities. Traditionally, data captured from business applications such as Siebel E-Commerce show the business activities that actually took place – the service requests that are filed or the orders that are placed. They don't tell why transactions did not happen as users abort their shopping activities. Data from RUEI tells the other side of the picture. Since Oracle develop business applications, enterprise management tools, and business intelligence technologies, we are in the best position to help business leaders put all these information together to achieve insights.
I hope that you find these capabilities appetizing. But there's more. Check out the complete list of improvements in the first chapter of Oracle Enterprise Manager Concepts Guide, and come back to this blog as I cover the features in more details in the coming weeks.
As I mentioned in my post last week, this release is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. So what are those goodies? Here are some of the most important enhancements.
For Application Administrators
This release takes Enterprise Manager Grid Control's top-down application management capabilities to the next level. Of all the new and improved features, probably the most significant is our expanded support for the Oracle Weblogic Server. Weblogic support is important because this component serves as the foundation of many Oracle products. Weblogic not only forms the basis of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is the foundation for upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications, but it is also a key technology used to modernize the various packaged Oracle applications. In other words, improved support for Weblogic management benefits not only administrators of custom Java applications, but also administrators of packaged Oracle applications. For example, the latest Siebel CRM 8.1.1 release incorporates Oracle Application Development Framework into its software stack to enable the latest generation of customer self service applications. As Oracle evolves the current packaged applications using Java EE technologies, it is important that the tools for managing these applications are evolved with them.
One thing to keep in mind is that Enterprise Manager's support for Weblogic is not a completely new thing. In fact, Enterprise Manager began supporting Weblogic monitoring in 2006, two years before Oracle acquired BEA. The support was part of Enterprise Manager's heterogeneous management capabilities, which also include support for monitoring Websphere, JBoss and .NET. In 10gR5, Weblogic support was strengthened to include the ability to:
- monitor the performance of top Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) & JSP’s in deployed applications;
- discover and monitor web services deployed to WebLogic Server
- monitor server resources (e.g. data sources, JMS servers, resource adapters, JOLT connection pools)
- view, compare and track more configuration items such as JVM vendor/version, additional tuning parameters, cluster configuration, JMS resources, virtual hosts, JOLT connection pools, and configuration files
For packaged applications, Application Management Pack for Siebel was refreshed to add official support for Siebel 8.1.1, the brand new version of Siebel CRM that Oracle released recently. In the old days, it was always a challenge to get third party management vendors to support new Siebel releases in a timely manner. As the old saying goes – if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. Now that we build our own management tools, we can ensure that our new application releases are covered. In addition to 8.1.1 support, this new release of the Siebel Pack also include Workflow Process Monitoring, Workflow Policy Monitoring, Event Log Analysis, improved Discovery and Application Service Monitoring.
In addition to the updated Siebel Pack, we released new application accelerators for Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). RUEI helps IT monitor actual end user experience, answering important questions such as: Who logged onto the applications? What did the users do? What response time did they get and what sort of errors did they run into? Following the approach that we started with our application management packs to provide tools engineered for specific packaged Oracle applications, our two accelerators – one for Oracle E-Business S uite and one for Siebel CRM, provide out of the box management capabilities for these Oracle applications so that the time to get the tool up and running is reduced.
These three packaged application management improvements are just the first wave of enhanced support for Oracle applications that we are introducing for 2009. Stay tuned for more to come.
In addition to better Weblogic Server support and improved management for Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite, 10gR5 also contains support for Oracle Coherence application grid technology, improved support Oracle Service Bus, BPEL Process Monitoring, Java Application Diagnostics, Composite Application Modeling and Monitoring and Application Configuration Management. There is way too much information to cover in one post, so check out this document for an overview, and come back to this blog for more indepth discussions later on.
For DBAs
Oracle Enterprise Manager started out as a database management tool, and this 10gR5 release should please DBAs who are looking for further improvements to an already impressive package. This release provides support for Oracle Database 11gR1, enabling multiple database servers to be managed centrally. You may wonder – how could 10g Enterprise Manager Grid Control manage 11g Oracle Database? The answer is even though the two products carry similar versioning schemes, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Oracle Database are on different release schedules. Therefore, there is nothing unusual about using Enterprise Manager 10g to manage an 11g Oracle Database.
Some of the key enhancements for Oracle Database Management includes:
- support for 11g database features such as ADDM for RAC, real-time SQL monitoring, partition advisor and automatic SQL tuning;
- database replay – an automatic way to capture product workload, copying it to a test system, setting up the software and the test database to reflect the state of the source system at time of capture, deploying replay clients, orchestrating the replay process, and analyzing the replay results;
- database change propagation – synchronize data dictionary to propagate schema changes from a dictionary baseline or a database to a target database;
- some of these capabilities actually existed in the 9i version of Enterprise Manager and have brought it back with full integration within Grid Control;
- customizable tile based views to monitor waits and other metrics across multiple RAC nodes in a cluster;
- improved performance workflows for cluster cache coherency, historic views, and drilldown;
- service-centric monitoring facilitates the monitoring of workflows and drilldowns for RAC services;
- a new HA Console to monitor overall HA configuration status and initiate operations;
- a Maximum Availability Architecture Configuration Advisor page allows you to evaluate the configuration and identify solutions for protection from computer, site, storage, human and data corruption failures, enabling workflows to implement Oracle Recommended solutions;
- automatic configuring of Oracle-recommended Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) for databases with minimum downtime;
- you can now migrate database to ASM, and convert single instance database to RAC all with minimum downtime using standby technology to minimize downtime;
- a Streams dashboard, along with improved monitoring of streams configurations, allows you to monitor streams components as well as end-to-end paths for Latency and Throughput metrics.
These enhancements help DBAs plan their database changes better by leveraging production workload in order to analyze the potential impact of database changes, make changes more easily by automating the migration of changes, and ensure the database is more robust by implementing leading database maximum availability practices prescribed by Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture guidelines.
For CIOs
For a long time, IT decision makers have had to make important IT decisions on less than perfect information. Worst yet, the information available often did not represent the reality faced by IT's customers – the lines of business. It puts IT at a rather disadvantaged position. With Real User Experience Insight and Enterprise Manager's Service Level Management capabilities, CIO can get much better information to demonstrate the value that IT delivers, and to ask for the needed resources using factual information to back up the requests.
Equally important, the expanding capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control mean that many important IT assets can now be managed better and with fewer resources. IT is always shorthanded, so freeing up resources mean that the CIO now has the flexibility to invest on new projects that his/her counterparts in line of business have been asking for in order to drive the organization forward.
Enterprise Manager's expanding footprint also means that IT departments can move forward with their goals of simplifying their vendor management by consolidating their spending with fewer vendors. Gone are the days when organizations have to go to different vendors to get applications, middleware, development tools, databases, O/S and enterprise management systems.
For Applications' Business Sponsors
While not direct users of Oracle Enterprise Managers, the line of business sponsors of the applications also benefit from all these improvements. For example, Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) can be used by not only IT administrators, but also business analysts to perform click stream analysis in order to understand consumer behaviors on eCommerce and self-service applications, where increasingly amount of business activities are carried out. When the data collected from RUEI is combined with those captured from the business applications and analyzed using tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence, businesses can get unprecedented clarity on business activities. Traditionally, data captured from business applications such as Siebel E-Commerce show the business activities that actually took place – the service requests that are filed or the orders that are placed. They don't tell why transactions did not happen as users abort their shopping activities. Data from RUEI tells the other side of the picture. Since Oracle develop business applications, enterprise management tools, and business intelligence technologies, we are in the best position to help business leaders put all these information together to achieve insights.
I hope that you find these capabilities appetizing. But there's more. Check out the complete list of improvements in the first chapter of Oracle Enterprise Manager Concepts Guide, and come back to this blog as I cover the features in more details in the coming weeks.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is Coming!
Some of you may notice that I have been awfully quiet on my blog for the past two months. You may wonder – did something happen to this guy? Well, I am still here at Oracle. The reason why I have not done much writing recently is because I have been head down working with my colleagues to ship a new release and to plan for the next ones.
I am happy to say that the new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is going to be released real soon. I can't talk about what is in the product just yet, but I can tell you that it is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. If you really want to find out what the release has in store for you, tune in to our product launch webcast on Tuesday, March 3 at 9 a.m. PST. Our fearless leader, Richard Sarwal, will host this event. After the webcast, come back to my blog to get more “inside scope” on the product.
See you next Tuesday.
I am happy to say that the new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is going to be released real soon. I can't talk about what is in the product just yet, but I can tell you that it is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. If you really want to find out what the release has in store for you, tune in to our product launch webcast on Tuesday, March 3 at 9 a.m. PST. Our fearless leader, Richard Sarwal, will host this event. After the webcast, come back to my blog to get more “inside scope” on the product.
See you next Tuesday.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Leading Practices of Application Management Webinars for January 2009
Our webinar series on Leading Practices of Application Management is entering its third month, and we have an exciting lineup of topics to cover:
- Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
- Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
- PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
- E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices
You may register at this website. Passcode for registration is "application".
Subject: Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
Date & Time: 1/6/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Amjad Afanah; Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130802901
Description: Business Intelligence Management Pack anchors Oracle’s solution for proactively managing your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition environment. Designed and implemented by Oracle’s application experts, the pack provides comprehensive, integrated, and BI EE-specific capabilities that help you achieve better application performance and availability while keeping your application IT operational costs down.
In this webinar, we will present to you the key features of the product, which include:
- Service Level Management
- Configuration Management
- BI EE Component Monitoring
- Synthetic User Monitoring
Subject: Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/13/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Richard Exley; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Maximum Availability Architecture
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130803325
Description: This webinar reviews best practices for the Oracle technology stack and how customers using Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management are leveraging Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC); Oracle Clusterware, including disaster recovery strategies; Oracle Enterprise Manager and Maximum Availability Architecture to get peak availability out of their Siebel implementation.
Subject: PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
Date & Time: 1/20/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: David Nix; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, PeopleTools
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804448
Description: Everyone wants their applications from Oracle's PeopleSoft product line to operate with maximum performance. In this webinar, a PeopleSoft performance and benchmark expert shares tips and techniques for maximizing the performance of your PeopleSoft applications. Those new to tuning a PeopleSoft application as well as seasoned tuning experts will come away with new techniques that will help them improve the performance of their PeopleSoft applications.
Subject: E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/27/2009, 10 a.m. EST / 3 p.m. GMT
Presenter: Max Arderius; Manager, ATG Development
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804016
Description: This webinar covers the Oracle E-Business Suite architecture and explains various techniques for installing and cloning by use of Rapid Install, Rapid Clone, and Application Management Pack cloning automation.
- Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
- Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
- PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
- E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices
You may register at this website. Passcode for registration is "application".
Subject: Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
Date & Time: 1/6/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Amjad Afanah; Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130802901
Description: Business Intelligence Management Pack anchors Oracle’s solution for proactively managing your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition environment. Designed and implemented by Oracle’s application experts, the pack provides comprehensive, integrated, and BI EE-specific capabilities that help you achieve better application performance and availability while keeping your application IT operational costs down.
In this webinar, we will present to you the key features of the product, which include:
- Service Level Management
- Configuration Management
- BI EE Component Monitoring
- Synthetic User Monitoring
Subject: Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/13/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Richard Exley; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Maximum Availability Architecture
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130803325
Description: This webinar reviews best practices for the Oracle technology stack and how customers using Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management are leveraging Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC); Oracle Clusterware, including disaster recovery strategies; Oracle Enterprise Manager and Maximum Availability Architecture to get peak availability out of their Siebel implementation.
Subject: PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
Date & Time: 1/20/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: David Nix; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, PeopleTools
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804448
Description: Everyone wants their applications from Oracle's PeopleSoft product line to operate with maximum performance. In this webinar, a PeopleSoft performance and benchmark expert shares tips and techniques for maximizing the performance of your PeopleSoft applications. Those new to tuning a PeopleSoft application as well as seasoned tuning experts will come away with new techniques that will help them improve the performance of their PeopleSoft applications.
Subject: E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/27/2009, 10 a.m. EST / 3 p.m. GMT
Presenter: Max Arderius; Manager, ATG Development
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804016
Description: This webinar covers the Oracle E-Business Suite architecture and explains various techniques for installing and cloning by use of Rapid Install, Rapid Clone, and Application Management Pack cloning automation.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
A Holistic Approach to Siebel CRM Monitoring
What should we monitor on Siebel CRM?
It turns out to be a rather common question, even for some of our long time customers. In fact, I was on a call with a customer this morning and heard a rather lively discussion amongst its staff on this topic. I probably should write a white paper about this. However, knowing how much work I have to finish before taking some time off for Christmas, it could be a while before I can publish a formal white paper, so let me try to share some of my thoughts in real time. Consider this a first installment of a best practice white paper.
Before I talk about what needs to be monitored, let me define what I mean by monitoring. Monitoring, as defined by the Webster Dictionary, is to watch, to keep track of, or check usually for a specific purpose. In technical sense, it is the set of activities to gather telemetry data from a piece of hardware or software, analyze the data, and provide some sort of notification if some sort of exceptions are found. Monitoring is closely related to diagnostic. In fact, the same piece of telemetry can be used for both purposes. One might want to monitor CPU usage using data gathered in real time, and examine a time series of CPU trend in diagnosing performance data. Personally, I tend to classify monitoring as the set of tasks that lead to the realization of an exception, and diagnostic as the set of tasks that follow to determine problem root causes. In ITIL terms, monitoring may lead to creation of an incident, while diagnostic is carried out in incident and problem management.
Now that I have defined what I mean by monitoring, let's talk about what needs to be monitored.
The obvious things to monitor are CPU, memory, disk space, and I/O (disk, network, etc...). These are the most basic computing resources that Siebel and its underlying database depend on, and they are finite resources, so it makes sense to monitor them. However, these are not the only things, nor are they necessary the most important things.
One thing that makes monitoring Siebel different from monitoring other technologies is that Siebel is an application. As an application, it interacts with users directly, whereas most users do not deal directly with the database, or the load balancer, or the storage devices, and so on. Consequently, the primary purpose of application monitoring is to make sure that the application is providing the service level that users expect in order to do their jobs.
Many things can impact application service level. In fact, every component in a Siebel environment, including but not limited to the Siebel application server, web server, gateway server, report server, CTI, database, storage device, server, network switch, router, load balancer, WAN, etc... can all impact service level. Therefore, it is important to monitor everything, right? Yes and no.
Traditionally, application monitoring means monitoring all the components, and the health of the application is the aggregate health of all the components. However, this kind of bottom up approach is increasingly ineffective because of the increasing amount of redundancy built into production application environments, and because many applications are becoming more and more service oriented. For example, with RAID, it is no big deal to lose a disk. With Oracle RAC, you can lose a database server node and the database will keep on running. With Siebel app server clustering, you can lose an app server altogether but the application would continue to function (yes, users logged onto that server would need to log on again). The point that I want to make is that while it is bad to have component failures, they are not the big catastrophes that they used to be in their service level impacts.
The starting point of Siebel monitoring should be from the top – monitor from the end user perspective by focusing on interactive user sessions and batch jobs, and then move downward to the components. If users have problems accessing application functionalities and getting good response times, or if batch jobs are not getting run within targeted batch window, you clearly have a problem with the application, and those problems may be caused by component level outages. On the other hand, if a server goes down but interactive user sessions and batch jobs are working just fine, you have less to worry about. You'll still want to find out and fix this problem, because the service level of your Siebel environment may drop below your target if another server goes down. Still, the server outage is less urgent than it used to be. In traditional component based monitoring approach, a server outage would be a fatal problem that demanded immediate action. In this top-down end user focused approach, a server outage would most likely be a warning unless there is no redundancy for the component.
Both active and passive approaches should be used for monitoring interactive user workload, and critical alerts should be generated if exceptions occur. I wrote about these two monitoring approaches in two previous postings (1, 2), so you can refer to those articles for more details. For batch workload, the key thing to focused on is whether the job finishes on time and whether errors or warnings are generated in processing the entries. Most of the data that you need to watch are in Siebel log files.
The next set of things to monitor are resources. They are important to monitor because resources tend to be finite. If they run out, processing either stops or is delayed. Keep in mind about the relative importance of these resource at the component level though – resource outage may not be a critical event in the grand scheme of things. Traditional resources to monitor include CPU, memory, disk space and I/O, but don't forget about Siebel-specific artifacts such as task count, and when monitoring traditional resource, you need to do it in the context of Siebel. In other words, you should monitor not only server level CPU, but also CPU consumption specific to the Siebel processes.
Lastly, monitor for exceptions, which can be errors showing up on log files, or summarized Siebel server and component statistics for number of level 0 and 1 errors, number of component crashes, restarts, or even number of database connection retries. These are important to monitor in the sense that while a single exception may not be a critical problem, a swamp of these errors happening within a relatively small time window is usually a bad sign, and may point to problems that could cause service level target to be missed.
What about the other Siebel server and component statistics? For the most part, the other statistics are useful for diagnostic and performance tuning purpose. They are not very useful for generating alerts. For example, it is not really practical to set an absolute threshold on a metric such as Average Reply Size, which shows the amount of data Siebel returns. What is a good value to set a threshold anyway? On the other hand, it would be useful to capture the information, and see how the value changes before and after a major application change in order to understand performance impacts. Statistics such as this one should be collected and saved into a database so that trend analysis can be performed.
I just touched on the surface of what should be monitored. There's more, as some of the more critical components require specific approaches. I guess I better add the white paper to my to-do list.
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