11i Upgrade Tips and Tools
Now you can get tips and tools to help with your 11i Upgrade. The information is brought to you by Oracle, Partners and OAUG members.

	What is New with Oracle Applications Manager
	What is the Upgrade Assistance Spreadsheet
	How to Move Custom Forms to Release 11i
	How to Significantly Reduce 11i Upgrade Downtime

	The new "Applications Dashboard", which provides a concise overview of the state of the E-Business Suite system, including information about configuration, usage, performance, and required maintenance activities.
	A system configuration editor for use with AutoConfig.
	Advanced capabilities for monitoring and managing Forms Listeners and Forms runtime processes.
	New extensibility features that allow users to integrate their own SQL scripts into Oracle Applications Manager 11i.
	Improved supportability with easier access to l0g files and the ability to capture and package Oracle Applications Manager 11i output for easy shipment to Oracle Support.
	Enhanced troubleshooting capabilities for Concurrent Managers.
	Improved Applications Usage Reports for tracking system throughput of key business objects such as Order Entry lines, Purchase Line items, and expense reports.
	Enhanced system management capabilities for Oracle Workflow.

Oracle Applications Manager 11i
Oracle Applications Manager can be used for a wide variety of tasks such as administering services, examining system configuration, managing Oracle Workflow, examining applied patches, and measuring system usage.

With Oracle Applications Manager, a system administrator can easily monitor the status of a system including the database, application tier services, concurrent requests, and Oracle Workflow processes. Administrators can also control application tier services and submit concurrent requests directly from the console.

Oracle Applications Manager allows administrators to monitor the E-Business Suite system. The “Applications Dashboard” provides a concise overview of the state of the E-Business Suite system, including information about configuration, usage, performance, and required maintenance activities. Charts and graphs provide intuitive summaries, and allow the user to drill down for more detailed information.

Oracle Applications Manager provides diagnostic features for Applications systems. The console displays errors recently reported by system components such as transaction managers or concurrent requests. For running processes such as forms or concurrent requests, system administrators can examine the database session details, including any currently executing SQL. Tools such as Concurrent Manager Recovery help the user diagnose problems and take corrective action from the same interface. Output from diagnostic interfaces can be captured and packaged for shipment to Oracle Support with the push of a button.

Oracle Applications Manager provides access to configuration information for all of the tiers of an Applications system. The console provides tools to detect potential configuration problems such as recently altered site-level profile option settings or database initialization parameters that do not meet the requirements or recommendations of Oracle. For systems that use AutoConfig, Oracle Applications Manager also provides a comprehensive system configuration editor.

Oracle Applications Manager allows administrators to configure, monitor, and control Concurrent Processing. Combined with the new Service Management feature of Release 11i, Oracle Applications Manager can be used to monitor and control Oracle Forms Listeners, Metrics Servers, Metrics Clients, Reports Servers, Apache Servers, and other application tier services.

Oracle Applications Manager provides end to end management of Oracle Forms. Application tier Forms processes are correlated with their corresponding database sessions. For Application Tier processes, Administrators can view the CPU and memory utilization, control runtime diagnostics, and to view diagnostic log files. For database sessions, Administrators can view session details, control tracing, and even terminate sessions.

Oracle Applications Manager can be used to control Oracle Workflow system services, such as background engines, notification mailers, agent listeners, and queue propagation. Administrators can monitor and analyze Oracle Workflow system activity, suspend and resume processes, retry activities that end in error, and purge obsolete Workflow data.

With Oracle Applications Manager, administrators can examine the patches applied to an Oracle Applications system. System administrators can easily determine which patches have been applied to a system, including the individual patches included in mini-packs, maintenance packs, and merged patches. Administrators can also examine the patched files on a system, and find all of the patches that altered a given file. For each patch applied, Oracle Applications Manager can show the individual actions taken by each patch driver.

Administrators can extend Oracle Applications Manager using their own custom SQL scripts. Not only can SQL scripts be organized and accessed within OAM, but drilldowns can be enabled from script output to standard OAM interfaces. For example, users can drill down from concurrent request IDs returned by a SQL script to the standard OAM interface for concurrent request details.

The Upgrade Assistant Spreadsheet aggregates time for each category and displays the cumulative time. This number indicates total effort time not the wall clock time to execute as most steps within a category can be run in parallel. If a particular category is taking too long, then try to enlist more human resources so that more steps can be run concurrently. Look for individual steps that take a long time (rate determining steps) and focus resources on ways to reduce the time. As of Release 11i.6, there are two enhancements related to identifying steps that do not need to be performed. The Upgrade Management Script (TUMS) will report for your specific configuration and set of licensed products those steps, which you do not need to do. In this manner about 30% of the steps can be eliminated. In addition, to aid in planning the Upgrade Assistant Spreadsheet will include the ability for you to flag those steps identified as not needing to be run.

To use the Test file system for the Production upgrade:

	Prepare the target system (This is the location for your Production system).
	Run Rapid Install in category 2 to install a new instance use the Create Upgrade file system option). This installs the technology stack, an APPL_TOP (that you will replace later), and creates configuration files.
	Use the Rapid Clone utility in pre-clone mode to preserve the environment.
	Copy the Applications file system (APPL_TOP, OA_HTML, and JAVA_TOP) from the successfully upgraded Test system to the Production system.
	Manually re-apply the configuration files saved by the Rapid Clone utility. The configuration files are saved in COMMON_TOP/admin/clone.
	Set the ORACLE_HOME / TWO_TASK to use the Production database or copy the database.
	Apply all technology stack patches you previously applied to the Test system.
	Upgrade the Production system as you normally would.
	During post-upgrade apply the database drivers for patches previously applied to Test. Perform any necessary manual database changes. There is no need to run either copy drivers or generate drivers as these have already been applied to the file system.