Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 New Features Overview
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2
New Features Overview
Purpose
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control has added lots
of new functionality to Release 2. This tutorial is provided to help you navigate
and understand the major new features.
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Overview
Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 allows customers
to deliver heightened application performance and realize dramatic savings in
IT administration and maintenance costs. Enterprise Manager's robust service
level management functionality brings together business priorities with IT application
performance requirements in ways it never has before. Rich configuration management
and provisioning functionality eliminate the error-prone, manual tactics that
plague most data centers and drive up the overall cost of management. In a time
when administration resources are at a premium, and businesses are forced to
tightly control IT spending budgets, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 is a must-have tool
for small and large enterprises that want to make the Grid a reality for their
IT department.
This OBE focuses on the following 3 areas:
- Managing Systems
- Grid Operations
- Extensibility
In Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2, a System is modeled as a new type of
target. The application that runs on this system is modeled as another type
of target called Service. To monitor an email application in EM, you would first
create a System in Enterprise Manager, such as Mail System, that consists of
the database, listener, application server, and hosts targets on which the email
application runs. You would then create a Service target to represent the email
application, and specify that it runs on the Mail System target.
Monitoring performance of the components and quickly correcting
problems before they can impact business operations is crucial. Oracle Enterprise Manager
10g Release 2 provides comprehensive, flexible, easy-to-use monitoring functionality
that supports the timely detection and notification of impending IT problems
across your enterprise. Service level agreements are used to measure application
availability and performance. By constantly monitoring a service, you can identify
problems and their potential impact, diagnose root causes of service failure,
and fix these in compliance with the service level agreements.
1.
Open the browser and enter the following URL:
http://<management
service hostname>.<domain>:<port>/em/
The default port value on a clear machine is 7777. However,
if there are other instances running on the machine, then the port may
be different.
Login page will be displayed. Enter the User Name and
Password. Click the Login button.
2.
Click Targets.
3.
Click Systems.
4.
Systems is a new subtab under Targets that provides an enterprise view
of all Enterprise Manager defined Systems. A system is the infrastructure
used to host one or more services. A system consists of components such
as hosts, databases, and other targets. Click any system from the list.
5.
On the Home page of the system, you will see the availability status,
status of the services within a system, all changes made to the configuration
of the system in the last 7 days, alerts, policy violations, security
policy violations, and advice on critical patches. Click the Charts
subtab to see various performance charts associated with this system.
6.
Here are a series of performance charts for this system. Since a system
contains multiple target types, it allows you to define which charts are
relevant for displaying. Click Topology.
7.
One of the newest features to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 are the Topology views. Here
you can see a graphical representation of all the components and their
relationships that make up a system. By moving the mouse pointer over
a target, you can see detailed information. As mentioned earlier, a System
can support multiple Services. Let's take a look at one of this System's
Services, Petstore Application. Click Services.
8.
Here are all the Services defined across
your enterprise. A "service" in Grid Control represents a business
function supported by one or more protocols such as DNS, LDAP, POP, or SMTP.
A service can also be a Web application, or other specific applications
such as Oracle Collaboration Suite.
Starting from the left, you see the Service name, type of service, status,
and performance and Usage Alerts. The next column shows the underlying
System that supports this Service, so in this case, it's the PetStore_System
we previously examined - look at the number of Services it supports. Also
note, on the far right, you will see Key Tests and Monitoring Beacons.
The Beacons have predefined Key Tests they perform against the Service
to determine availability and usage. Click any one of the listed services.
9.
The Services Home page provides a general overview of the status, availability,
performance, usage, and expected service level % of the service. It also
provides a summary of the status and alerts for all key components of
the Web application. Click the Test Performance tab.
10.
The availability of a service can be determined by running key "tests"
for a generic service, or "transactions" in the case of Web
applications. On the Test Performance page, you can view the individual
performance of any key test.
Looking right along the tab portion of the Web Application, you will
see Page Performance, Request Performance, System, Topology, and Monitoring
Configuration. To drilldown into more detail for each of these options,
please refer to the "Managing Systems and Services by Using Oracle
Enterprise Manager 10g, Release 2" Oracle By Example. For now, let's
examine one more subtab, Topology. Click Topology.
11.
The Topology viewer for the PetStore Application shows the service dependencies
and the system on which the service runs. This view will also identify
and service Root Cause associated with the system that supports it.
Dashboards are provided to view the health of managed targets within
a group or system in real time. The System Dashboard presents information using
intuitive icons and graphics that let you spot recent changes and quickly identify
and respond to problems.
1.
There are two different ways to launch dashboards. Let's start by looking
at the Systems dashboard. Click Systems.
2.
Click any system from the list.
3.
Click Launch Dashboard.
4.
Using the System Dashboard, you can view all the critical components
and their statuses. It also shows the alerts that are generated for the
components. You can customize the System Dashboard by clicking the Customize
link at the top-right corner. Select the System name at the top of the
Dashboard to go back to the System Home page.
5.
Now, let's take a look at a different way to access dashboards. Click
Reports.
6.
Scroll down to the Dashboard category and click System Monitoring
Dashboard.
7.
Click the flashlight icon to select the target.
8.
Now you have the option to look at any system or group's dashboard. Select
any group or system from the list and click Select.
9.
Click Continue.
10.
You can now see the Dashboard for the selected group.
11.
Select the System name at the top of the Dashboard to go back to the
System Home page.
12.
Click Reports.
13.
Scroll down to the Dashboards category and click All Services
Monitoring Dashboard.
14.
Click the flashlight icon
to select a target.
15.
Select any service from the list and click Select.
16.
Click Continue.
17.
It shows the summary of all the Web Application Services.
A grid consists of many different targets that support
many types of systems. Grid Operations refers to functionality that scales across
multiple targets within your Grid. Enterprise Manager examines security vulnerabilities
across your enterprise, provides a full reporting framework that looks at any
target / timeline, and allows jobs and monitoring definitions to be applied
across systems, groups, and individual targets.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 provides tools and procedures to
help you ensure that you are managing your Oracle environment in a secure manner.
Because security is crucial to the stability of your enterprise,
security policies are displayed prominently in the Grid Control. On the Oracle Enterprise
Manager Grid 10g Release 2 Home page and many target home pages, there is a separate
section displaying the Security Policy Violations for the target.
1.
Click on the Policies tab.
2.
Click Security At Glance.
3.
The Security At a Glance feature provides an overview of the security
health of the enterprise for all the targets or specific groups. This
helps you to quickly focus on security issues by showing statistics about
security policy violations and noting the critical security patches that
have not been applied.
A few things to note on this page:
The violation flux chart that will help compare the violation fix
rate with the violation arrival rate.
The compliance trend for the enterprise. The Compliance Score graph
reflects the overall compliance of the enterprise with respect to the
security policies that are being evaluated for the different targets.
Below those charts are a rollup of different security indicators
such as Severity Statistics, Violating Targets. Critical Security Patch
Advisories.
Information Publisher, Enterprise Manager's powerful reporting
framework, makes information about your managed environment available to audiences
across your enterprise. Administrators can use reports to show activity, resource
utilization, and configuration of managed targets. IT managers can use reports
to show availability of sets of managed systems. Business executives can view
reports on availability of applications (such as corporate e-mail or other critical
business applications) over a period of time.
1.
Click the Reports Tab.
2.
Scroll down to Monitoring / Alerts and Policy Violations. Here is the
list of all predefined reports (out-of-box and custom). Reports can be
customized or created on the fly. Click on 20 Most Common Alerts and
Policy Violations.
3.
This report shows the top 20 most common alerts (metric) and policy violations.
Groups are an efficient and effective way to logically organize,
manage, and monitor the components in your global environments. A group can
include targets of the same type, such as all your production databases, or
include targets of different types, such as all targets comprising your business
application.
1.
Click the Targets Tab.
2.
Click the Groups Tab.
3.
Click any group from the list.
4.
The group home page shows the most important information for the group
and enables you to drill down for more information. The home page shows
the overall status of the group, including its current availability, a
rollup of alerts and violations, and critical patch advisories for members
of the group. Group functionality allows actions to be performed / applied
against the group as a single action through preferred credentials.
The System Monitoring functionality in Oracle Enterprise Manager
10g Release 2 refers to features that enable administrators to monitor infrastructure components
of the Oracle Ecosystem. This includes Oracle components (such as the Oracle
database and Oracle Application Server), as well as other components (such as
hosts and third-party application servers that interact with Oracle and are
also monitored in Enterprise Manager).
1.
Click Databases.
2.
Click any database from the list.
3.
Scroll down and click Metric and Policy Settings
4.
This is a monitoring template for the database. As you can see, each
out of box threshold can be edited to each target's specific needs. To
the right is the Corrective actions column, where an administrator can
link a job, script or any type of action to a specific violation. And to
the right of Corrective Actions is the Collection Schedule. This allows
an administrator to edit the pulling frequency and/or turn off certain
metrics.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 can simplify the patching of Oracle software
on any host where the Management Agent is running. This lets administrators
have direct access to Oracle Metalink for download and identifying necessary
patches. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 also supports off-line patching, identification, distribution,
and installation against Oracle targets.
1.
Click the Deployments tab.
2.
Click Patch Linux Hosts.
3.
Click Provisioning.
4.
Provisioning, or re-provisioning refers to the activity of installing
or loading software on a hardware server. In the case of a "bare-metal"
hardware server, it is assumed that there has been no history of any software
installation on that machine before.
In the case of re-provisioning, all existing software versions on a given
computer will be destroyed, and only the software components that have
been specified in the selected image will be installed. The provisioning
activity involves working with hardware servers, software components,
images, and directives among many others.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 provides an interface to extend management
to non-oracle targets enabling comprehensive monitoring of heterogeneous environments.
This is done using a Management Plug-in. A Management Plug-in is a group of
files that defines a new Enterprise Manager target type. Once defined in Enterprise
Manager’s Repository, it is treated like any other 1st tier citizen of
Grid Control using the job system, reports, metric collection / alerting, and
policies. Let’s take a look at a couple examples.
1.
Click the Targets tab.
2.
Click Plug-ins.
3.
This is a group made up of all the plug-ins configured within this environment.
We’re using this as a launch pad to look at some of the different
plug-ins. Click Members subtab
4.
Select Checkpoint Firewall.
5.
Here is the homepage for a the Checkpoint Firewall. As you can see, the
General information showing availability, host, and Black Out is at the
top of the page. Below this are the Alerts triggered by the Target, Severity,
Alert Triggered time stamp, Last Value, and check time. Click Reports
Subtab.
6.
Here are all the performance and usage metrics shown in values
and charts (below). The View Report allows you to drill down into any predefined
report (feel free to look at other reports).
Under Related Links, there is access to All Metrics, Blackouts, Monitoring
Configuration, Alert History, Reports, and “Launch Checkpoint Smart
Center UI”. Note that the Launch Checkpoint Smart Center UI provides
you the ability to quickly access the target’s administration tool.
Also, feel free to click around and look at the other Plug-ins.
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