Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

Demystifying WebLogic and Fusion Middleware Management

2013-05-17T14:46:00.000+08:00

Demystifying WebLogic and Fusion Middleware Management --- by Glen Hawkins, Senior Director, Product Management

By R A Sanyal on Apr 16, 2013

This week, we are going to switch gears and talk about something that is near and dear to everyone responsible for running applications and middleware in their environment and that is monitoring and management with specific emphasis on the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control solution.

Often, this particular topic is dismissed early in the architectural discussion and doesn’t rear its (sometimes ugly) head until development is fairly far along on a new application and planning their deployment or worse, problems in production begin to impact the overall service levels of an application to the point that the end-users are complaining or top line revenue is being lost because of poor performance or reliability problems. The result is that the inexperienced will treat monitoring and management of their middle tier and their application system as a whole as an afterthought, while those that are more experienced or forward looking will tackle it from day one.

So, let's start with some common pitfalls or myths that people run into when considering or planning the deployment of their management along with some discussions on each of these points:

I think that most that have attempted this in the past have learned the error of their ways. Most tools such as administration consoles like the WebLogic Administration Console are designed to get the product up and running and for general configuration and administration purposes of a single domain. They are not intended as a solution to monitor and manage many domains (possibly even multiple versions of those domains) as well as the entire application infrastructure (i.e. Databases, Hosts, Message Queues, Service Buses, etc) at once. And, they routinely don’t provide any historical metrics or real 24/7 diagnostics. No administrator wants to be in a situation where a problem occurred an hour ago and they no longer have any information on it because they only have real-time data. You need both real-time and historical monitoring and diagnostics capabilities.

In addition, administrators routinely want to be able to answer the usual question that comes up when everything was running fine one day and fails to perform on the next, which is “what has changed”. You need historical information to refer to at all tiers of the application including the host as well as visibility across the stack including both monitoring and configuration data to answer that question.

Possible answers could be that the end-users have increased, the way the end-users were using the application has changed (i.e. that marketing event you didn’t know about changed behavior), application changes, WebLogic domain changes, JVM changes, a patch was applied, or someone even may have started running something new on the machine or impacted the OS.

Correlating these changes and coming to a quick conclusion is key to ensure optimal application service levels in a production environment for your end-users. That means that you need a full stack 24/7 real-time and historical monitoring solution that can also provide meaningful diagnostics and and track/compare configuration standards across the entire application system stack which is something that only Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is able to provide in the case of the Oracle stack.

This one is quite simple at the end of the day, especially for those that have been pulled into a war room in regards to a production application emergency with all the finger pointing and frustration that routinely ensues. The various team members responsible for the different portions of an application system almost always need to collaborate to resolve problems. By using separate tools, collaboration can be slow and frustrating.

A single pane of glass with different roles and privileges mitigating who can see what allows everyone to speak the same language. At the end of the day, when a fire drill arises, communication and collaboration will allow you to pull through, which is greatly enhanced with the correct solution.

Oracle’s Enterprise Manager Cloud Control solution was designed to promote this level of communication between roles with flexible dashboards providing different views of the application to different team members and diagnostics that can provide meaningful diagnostics such as bi-directional navigation between JVM threads and Oracle database sessions which goes well beyond just isolating SQL calls and the Middleware Diagnostics Advisor which provides recommendations diagnostic findings for WebLogic stack to quickly cut down on your time to resolution as opposed to raw metrics which force you to piece together fragments of the story from completely separate tools.

I think this particular myth tends to surprise those that are new to application and middle-tier management. In development environments, particularly during the QA and load testing phases for most applications, the environments are usually so well controlled and, as they are not in production, you can more easily reproduce errors and attempt to resolve them in these environments. However, in production environments, it becomes extremely difficult to reproduce issues as the load, network, application environment, and overall intermittent behavior of all of the tiers can challenge even the most technical operations person including those who developed the application in the first place.

We routinely see issues reported by end-users in production environments where monitoring is minimal. Often, hours, days, even weeks are spent trying to reproduce issues or waiting for them to happen again if they are intermittent and no historical monitoring and diagnostics is available in the environment. The bottom-line is that you need to be able to diagnose problems in the production environment itself.

Within Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, both historical and real-time metrics are available 24/7 across all tiers and they are correlated together. Let me provide a quick simple example of a possible root cause analysis scenario where an application is perhaps degrading in performance over time. Memory analysis tools by themselves are not able to pinpoint the problem, but it is clear that there is a buildup of referenced objects on the heap (i.e. possibly falling under the high level classification of a “memory leak” like issue, but then again there are possibly other causes). The historical solution might be to attempt to restart servers on a regular basis trying to maintain high availability as you do, but that will not get you closer to finding the real issue and it is a band-aid at the end of the day that may very well fail when and if capacity increases for your application.

Let’s say we start with getting a notification from Enterprise Manager Cloud Control that a critical alert has occurred on the Work Manager – Pending Requests metric indicating there is a buildup of requests in the application. This an early indicator and the Request Processing Time alert likely soon to follow if the trend continues, so let’s jump in and diagnose the problem.

First, let’s look at one of the higher level customizable dashboards in the product to see the lay of the land:

We can see from our WebLogic application above (just a simple Medrec example in this case) that all of our servers look like they are up and running, some of our heap and other metrics look high, but not unreasonable with the exception of some of our JVMs which show some DB Wait locks in red in the right-most bottom table. This is a sure indicator that the pending requests that we were alerted to earlier are likely associated with calls of some kind to the back-end database. If I click on the JVM in question, I can take this down a level.

Now we are on our JVM target home page within our WebLogic Domain hierarchy (many more metrics and capabilities there that we won’t go into in this blog, but I will provide links below to see those capabilities) where we can see a bit more detail and filter on anything to our heart’s delight by clicking on the various hour glasses to search on methods, requests, SQL, thread state, ECID (a transaction ID in FMW), and other criteria, which will filter the graphs further down the page which show thread breakdowns by many of these dimensions. I could also immediately create a diagnostic snapshot of the data to look at later if I so desired. I can also click on the Threads tab (next to the highlighted “General” tab above) and look at historical thread data or play with the timeframe, but we can see just by looking at this that we were correct about the threads in the DB Wait state and it has been going on for some time now. Let’s navigate from historical to JVM live threads (collected every 2 secs using native thread sampling as opposed to byte code instrumentation) to try to determine the root cause of why so many threads are stuck in the DB Wait state.

Looking above, it is apparent that we are running an SQL prepared statement originating from a front-end request from the “/registerPatient.action” URL. I could then click on the “SQL ID” to actually bring myself to the SQL in question within a tuning screen, but the route of more interest is to click on the DB Wait link highlighted in the lower half of the screen for one of the threads. This will take me into a read-only view of the actual Oracle database session itself.

Here we are in the database session itself. As an operations person or developer, my options are obviously very restricted, but I can see that there is a blocking session ID. Better yet, I can now click on that blocking session ID and see that something that is entirely outside of my WLS container or JVM is causing contention and I can now communicate with my DBA to address the problem. This could have been just as easily a badly tuned SQL statement or perhaps indicated an index problem. Likewise, I could have discovered that my threads were locked by one another or a Network Wait or even File IO. There are a multitude of possibilities, but because I have a tool that can see across these tiers, I can quickly diagnose the issue and I am speaking the same language as my DBA. DBAs can also drill back up by the way from SQL statements to the JVM and WLS container (also in read-only mode obviously), so they can be proactive about maintaining the application. This is just one simple example of how Enterprise Manager Cloud Control facilitates this type of communication between roles as there are many other similar features from the dashboards which can be tweaked per role giving the appropriate visibility for the various team members or the incident management that is designed to allow teams to collaborate or even work with Oracle Support via the WebLogic Support Workbench if necessary.

It is true that most Java transaction tracing solutions create overhead because of byte code instrumentation. There is certainly a time and place for this type of diagnostics which can be very detailed and rich in its analysis. Within Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, we do have an optional advanced diagnostics feature that provides this functionality. Overhead is routinely much lower than just about any other solution out there, and it is indeed able to run 24/7 without incurring much overhead. For many, the little overhead required is reasonable and well worth the enormous amount of visibility you get by being able to track individual or groups of transaction through each tier of your application isolating problems based on the actual payload.

However, for those who prefer to not use byte code instrumentation, the entire example provided above does not require any. It simply uses the stack metrics collected from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control agent, which sits on the host (not in the WLS container and thus out of process) and the JVMD agent, an extremely lightweight agent (just a war file) that uses native code sampling (no byte code instrumentation and thus no restart of the managed server). The bottom-line is that you can get a ton of visibility without incurring any noticeable overhead and decide where and if you want to also trace transactions on an individual basis. This type of flexibility ensures that all diagnostics needs are met.

Alright, so that was my last myth to dispel for this blog. I could go on for quite some time and show the many other capabilities of the Enterprise Manager product such as the earlier mentioned Middleware Diagnostics Advisor, log viewing and alerting, the multitude of dashboards, thresholds, lifecycle management, disaster recovery, and patch automation features that span the full capabilities of Oracle’s solution for WebLogic and Fusion Middleware management, but perhaps there will be time for another blog on those topics later.

For now, I will leave you with some resources to help you leap beyond the myths.

Additional Resources

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Middleware Management OTN Page

Free Online Self-Study Courses from Oracle Learning Library (OLL)

· Best Practices for WebLogic and SOA Management Self-Study Course

· Oracle Real User Experience Insight: Oracle's Approach to User Experience

· Oracle Real User Experience Insight: Basic Navigation, Data Structures, and Workflows

WLS Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics

· Navigate the Middleware Routing Topology

· Customize Middleware Performance Summaries

· Diagnose WebLogic and JVM Performance Bottlenecks

· Capture Diagnostics Snapshots

· Use the Middleware Diagnostics Advisor to Size the JDBC Connection Pool

· Diagnose Performance Issues End-to-End

· Construct a Service Level Agreement

· Overview of Business Transaction Management

· Service Dashboard

· Business Application Dashboard

WLS Configuration and Lifecycle Management

· Use and Report on Out-of-the-Box Compliance Standards

· Create WebLogic Domain Provisioning Profile

· Clone an Oracle WebLogic Domain from the Software Library

· Redeploy a Java EE Application

· Patching WebLogic Server

· Automate Disaster recovery with "Oracle Site Guard"

Coherence Management

· Manage and Monitor Oracle Coherence

· Provision Coherence

Real User Experience Insight

· Manage End User Performance with Real User Experience Insight

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c for Exalogic: Setting up Apps-to-Disk Monitoring

2013-04-11T22:29:00.001+08:00

By Gagan Chawla

Exalogic is the logical choice for running Business Applications and provides an excellent consolidation platform hosting wide range of application workloads. It’s important to have a comprehensive Apps-to-Disk monitoring of Exalogic system enabled including monitoring of business applications, software and hardware components together from a single Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c console.

There are two Exalogic configuration flavors specifically in the way Exalogic is implemented 1) Virtualized or 2) Non-virtualized/physical configuration. More details on system configuration with each Exalogic release are described in this MOS note here.

In this blog post, we will cover important steps that are required to enable Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (CC) 12c as a centralized monitoring platform with Apps-to-Disk visibility for either configuration of Exalogic.

Setting up Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c for monitoring virtualized Exalogic stack

Setup your EM CC 12cR2 site with latest PSU if not already done. Refer to EM 12cR2 install/upgrade guide here
Deploy EM CC 12cR2 agent on Exalogic Control Ops Center Enterprise Controller(EC) vServer
Export Ops Center Enterprise Controller trust certificate and import it to Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Management Agent

Ops Center Certificate should be imported to agent running on Ops Center Enterprise Controller.
Steps to Export and import the certificate here
It's recommended to use emctl to import - emctl secure add_trust_cert_to_jks -trust_certs_loc $CERT_LOC/oc.crt -password welcome -alias
Restart the agent after importing the certificate

Deploy EM CC 12cR2 agent on OVM Manager(OVMM) vServer. Deploy Oracle Virtualization (VT) plug-in on OMS if not already done and on agent installed on OVM Manager vServer.
Configure OVMM for read-only access [Mandatory]. Steps to configure OVMM for read-only access are here. If OVMM was registered with EM CC prior to performing this mandatory configuration then you must run synchronize operation from OVMM target menu in EM CC [Important]. Note – vDC operations are done via Exalogic Control that has embedded EM Ops Center pre-installed in the Exalogic system. Refer to Exalogic Administrator’s guide here
Register OVMM in EM CC site by following EM CC Cloud Administrator’s guide here . It’s recommended to use the same EM CC 12cR2 agent deployed on the OVMM vServer during the OVMM registration process.
Deploy and configure EM CC ZFS plug-in by referring to ZFS plug-in installation guide here. It’s recommended to use the agent deployed on Ops Center Enterprise Controller vServer for discovering ZFS Storage Appliance target.
Deploy and configure EM CC Engineered System Healthchecks plug-in by referring to plug-In Installation Guide here. It’s recommended to use the agent deployed on Ops Center Enterprise Controller vServer for discovering Healthchecks target.
Discover Exalogic system using Targets -> Systems UI and select deployment type ‘Virtual’ and use agent deployed on Exalogic Enterprise Controller for Exalogic targets discovery.
Configure Exalogic Guest Base Template and Exalogic network by referring to following guide here and deploy agents on guest vServers
FMW, Apps targets and Application stack should be discovered in EM CC. In case of Oracle Applications on Exalogic, it’s recommended to have respective Apps plug-ins (FA, EBS, PSFT, Siebel etc) deployed and configured. Refer to Applications Management pack collateral here.

EM CC Plug-Ins required in case of virtualized Exalogic configuration –

Fusion Middleware (FMW) Plug-in [Default plug-in and deployed out-of-box] - enables overall Exalogic stack management. Exalogic monitoring for virtualized configuration was introduced in FMW 12.1.0.3 plug-in (EM 12cR2 release)
Oracle Virtualization (VT) Plug-in – enables Virtual Targets monitoring integration. VT monitoring integration for Exalogic was introduced in VT 12.1.0.3 plug-in (EM12cR2 release)
ZFS plug-in – enables ZFS target monitoring
Engineered System Healthchecks plug-in – enables Exachk integration in EM CC
Oracle Applications plug-ins (FA, EBS, PSFT, Siebel etc) – enables respective Application Management capabilities

Setting up EM CC 12c for monitoring non-virtualized/physical Exalogic stack

Setup your EM CC 12cR2 site with latest PSU if not already done. Refer to EM 12cR2 install/upgrade guide here
Deploy EM 12cR2 agents on all Compute Nodes.
Discover Exalogic system via Targets -> Systems UI and select deployment type 'Physical’ and use any of the agents deployed on compute nodes for Exalogic targets discovery
Setup your EM Ops Center (OC) 12c site if not already done. Refer to EM OC 12c installation guide for Linux OS here and in case of Solaris OS here
Discover Exalogic infrastructure targets in EM OC 12c by following EM OC feature reference guide here
Deploy Exalogic Elastic Cloud Infrastructure (EECI) plug-in on EM CC OMS and management agent installed on OC Enterprise Controller server. Refer to EECI Plug in Install guide here for details and it’s also recommended to apply EECI plug-in patch 14214742. Each infrastructure component must be already discovered and managed in EM OC in previous step. Availability, performance and configuration Metrics for infrastructure components related to are collected by EM CC agent through EM OC JMX client.
Configure EM OC Enterprise Controller and EM CC repository connection by following EM OC Plug in guide here
Discover ‘Elastic Cloud Infrastructure’ target via Setup -> ‘Add Target’ -> ‘Add Targets Manually’ option and using agent deployed on Ops Center Enterprise Controller
Deploy and configure EM CC ZFS plug-in by referring to ZFS plug-in installation guide here. It’s recommended to use the agent deployed on EM OC Enterprise Controller server for discovering ZFS Storage Appliance target.
Deploy and configure EM CC Engineered System Healthchecks plug-in by referring to plug-In installation Guide here. It’s recommended to use the agent deployed on EM OC Enterprise Controller server for discovering Healthchecks target.
FMW, Apps targets and Application stack should be discovered in EM CC.In case of Oracle Applications on Exalogic, it’s recommended to have respective Apps plug-ins (FA, EBS, PSFT, Siebel etc) deployed and configured. Refer to Applications Management pack collateral here.

EM CC Plug-Ins required in case of non-virtualized/physical Exalogic configuration –

Fusion Middleware (FMW) Plug-in [Default plug-in and deployed out-of-box] – enables overall Exalogic stack management.
Exalogic Elastic Cloud Infrastructure (EECI) plug-in - enables Exalogic rack infrastructure components monitoring in EM CC
ZFS plug-in – enables ZFS target monitoring
Engineered System Healthchecks plug-in – enables Exachk integration in EM CC
Oracle Applications plug-ins (FA, EBS, PSFT, Siebel etc) – enables respective Application Management capabilities

Additional Collateral -

Understanding Exalogic Control

Oracle Exalogic: A Guide to Maximizing Operational Management Benefits (PDF)

Oracle Exalogic: A Guide to Administration Tasks and Tools (PDF)

Contributed by Gagan Chawla, Saurabh Sachdev and Sumit Choudhary

Database as a Service: Glad that you asked these!

2013-04-11T22:26:00.002+08:00

By Sudip Datta

Thanks for visiting my earlier blog post on the new Database as a Service (DBaaS) features which got released in Enterprise Manager 12cR2 Plugin Update 1.

Our first public webcast on DBaaS since the release was pretty well attended with peak attendance going well over our expectation. I wish we had more time to handle the technical Q&A, but since we didn't, let me use the blogosphere to answer some of the questions that were asked. I am repeating some of the questions that we answered during the webcast, because they warrant details beyond what the duration permitted.

Kevin from the audience asked "What's the difference between a regular provisioning and DbaaS?" Sometimes the apparently obvious ones are the most difficult to answer. The recently released whitepaper covers the regular/traditional provisioning versus DBaaS in detail. Long story cut short, in a traditional provisioning model, IT (usually a DBA) uses scripts and tools to provision databases on behalf of end users. In DBaaS IT's role changes and the DBA simply creates a service delivery platform for end users to provision databases on demand as and when they need them. And that too, with minimal inputs ! Here's how the process unfolds:

The DBA pools together a bunch of server resources that can host databases or a bunch of databases that can host schema and creates a Self-Service zone.
The DBA creates a gold image and provisioning procedure and expresses that as a service template
As a result, the end users do not have to deal with the intricacies of the provisioning process. They input a couple of very simple things like the service template and the zone and everything else happens under the hood. The provisioning process, the physicality of the database, etc are completely abstracted out.
And finally, because DbaaS deals with shared resource utilization and self-service automation, a DBaaS is usually complemented by quota, retirement and chargeback.

The following picture can make it clear.

In terms of licensing, for a traditional administrator driven database provisioning, you need the Database Lifecycle Management Pack. If you want to enable DBaaS on top of it, simply add the Cloud Management Pack for Database.

I will combine the next two questions. Alfred asked, "Is RAC a requirement?" (the short answer for which is "No") while Jud asked, "Is the schema-level provisioning supported in an environment where the target DBs are running in VMs?" First of all, in our DBaaS solution we support multiple models, as shown below.

In the dedicated database model, the database can run on a pool of servers or a pool of cluster. So both single instance and RAC are supported. Similarly, in the dedicated schema (Schema as a Service) model, it can run on single instance or RAC, which can in turn be hosted on physical servers or VMs. Enterprise Manager treats both physical servers and VMs as hosts and as long as the hosts have the agent installed, they can participate in DBaaS. Bottomline is that as we move from IaaS and offer these higher order services, the underlying infrastructure becomes irrelevant. This should also satisfy Steve, who queried "As the technology matures is there an attempt by Oracle to provide ODA vs EXADATA as the foundation of the dbaas to lower the cost?". The answer is YES. But, why wait? DBaaS is supported on Exa and ODA platforms TODAY. In fact, HDFC Bank in India is running DBaaS on Exadata. You can read about them in the latest Oracle Magazine.

Another interesting question came from Yuri. He asked, "Is there an option to disable startup/shutdown for the self-service users?" It can be answered in multiple ways. First of all, in Schema as a Service or dedicated schema model, the end user cannot control the database instance state because it houses database services (schemas) owned by others too. So this may be a good model for enterprises trying to limit what end users can do at the database instance level. However, in a dedicated database model, the Enterprise Manager out-of-box self-service console allows the end user to perform operations like startup and shutdown on the database instance. In general, if you want to create your tailored own self-service console with a limited set of operations exposed in the self-service interface, using the APIs may be the way to go. Enterprise Manager 12c also supports RESTFul APIs for self-service operations and hence a limited set of capabilities may be exposed. Check this technical presentation for the supported APIs.

Gordon's question precisely brings out the value of the Enterprise Manager 12c offering. He asked, "How do the services in the cloud get added to Cloud Control monitoring and alerting?" Ever since Amazon became the poster child of public IaaS, enterprises tried emulating their model within the data centers. What most people ignore or forget is that there is a life of the resources in a cloud beyond the provisioning process. Initial provisioning is just the beginning of that lifecycle. In Amazon's case, the management and monitoring of resources is the headache of Amazon's IT staff and consumers are oblivious to the time and effort it takes for them to manage the resources. In a private cloud scenario, one does not have that luxury. Once the database gets provisioned, it needs to monitored for performance, compliance and configuration drifts by company's own IT staff. In Enterprise Manager 12c, the agent is deployed on the hosts that constitute the pool making the databases automatically managed without any additional work. It comprehensively manages the entire lifecycle and both adminsitrators and self-service users have tailored views of the databases. Well, this also gives me an opportunity to address a question by a participant who alluded to a 3rd party tool exclusively for database provisioning purposes. First of all, as I mentioned during the webcast, Enterprise Manager 12c is the only tool that handles all the use cases- creation of full databases, schemas and cloning (both full clone and Snap Clone) from a single management interface. The point tools out there handle only fraction of these use cases- some specialize in cloning while others specialize in seed database provisioning. Second, as stated in the previous answer, provisioning is only the initial phase of the lifecycle and a provisioning tool cannot be synonymous with a cloud management tool. Thanks Gordon for helping me make that point!

Sam and Cesar share the honors for the most difficult question that came right at the beginning. "Has it started? Been on hold for a while ." was their reaction at two minutes past ten. This is possibly the most embarrassing one for me because I was caught in traffic. With due apologies for that, I wish my car operated like Enterprise Manager's Database as a Service!

By Sudip Datta

Great Grassroots Charity in India

2013-03-27T19:26:00.003+08:00

Dear Friends,

This is a great grassroots charity in India. Please Help.

They build an entire bore well for only a few thousand rupees.

Rotary club has a recent story about them. http://rotarystories-nzandpacific.blogspot.sg/2012/06/district-9940-rotary-clubs-provide.html

This is a photo of a well the Enterprise Manager Blog sponsored:

Please write directly to Mr. Rao below if you wish to give water to the thirsty poor people. God Bless.

Regards,

Porus.

Contact Details:

N.Srinivasa Rao

Executive Secretary

Chaitanya Educational and Rural Development Society

H.No: 3-68/1, 5th Lane

Pandaripuram

Chilakaluripet - 522616

Guntur District

A.P, INDIA

Ph.No. (Off) : +91-8647-252333

Mobile: +91 9666159615, +91 9866314720

E-mail: cerdsindia@gmail.com

Website: www.cerds-india.org

March 2013 Issue of EM Newsletter

2013-03-13T11:58:00.002+08:00

My Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c book has been mentioned prominently in the March 2013 issue of the Enterprise Manager Newsletter from Oracle, which goes out to thousands of subscribers:

Oracle Information InDepth: Oracle Enterprise Manager Edition

http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/nsl100158435-index-1914876.html

Regards,

Porus.

New Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Introduces Key Enhancements for Deploying and Managing Clouds

2013-02-25T10:38:00.000+08:00

By Sudip Datta on Feb 24, 2013

It has been a little more than a year, since we released our first cloud management features as a part of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. As customers started adopting our solution for a broad spectrum of workloads including production, QA, and development needs, we gained invaluable experience into the various use cases and requirements. Based on that experience, Oracle has released new and updated Management Plug-ins that precisely address the above requirements, ultimately leading to faster time-to-market for IT services delivery. In addition to providing enhanced cloud management support, the plug-ins extend Enterprise Manager's capabilities for Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), as well as introduce new features for Testing as a Service (TaaS). See "New Plug-in Features" below for additional details.
NEW PLUG-IN FEATURES:

+ Database as a Service (DBaaS):

    A sophisticated Database as a Service solution needs to cater to a variety of use cases:
•    A developer or a project owner requiring a new database service with or without seed data
•    QA requiring a full database refresh for intense load testing
•    QA requiring to create multiple clones for functional testing on subset of data

The current release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c offers new capabilities and support for managing database cloud services in all the above cases. It comes with out-of-box capabilities such as schema-as-a-service for extreme database consolidation and database cloning through Snap Clone or RMAN Backups. These capabilities provide an optimum utilization of development and database resources, giving customers more flexibility and control in managing the database lifecycle.

While some applications need dedicated databases, small home-grown applications can often share the database instance with other applications. Schema as a Service allows DBAs to consolidate multiple applications in the same database and offer logical slices of database to the end-users such as developers, thereby preventing database sprawl. They can enforce certain performance guarantee to these services by leveraging database Resource Manager, which prevents a particular user over-consuming the underlying compute resources. End-users can therefore request schema services from the self-service application without stepping on one another. Schema as a Service significantly reduces the administrative and maintenance overhead since only a limited number of such databases need to be managed and patched.

Cloning databases got significantly easier with the new plug-in. A new feature called “Snap Clone” really makes it snappy (terabytes of data can be cloned in a matter of minutes). The feature helps clone a database by leveraging the underlying “Copy on Write” technology offered by storage technologies, such as Netapp and ZFS Storage Appliance. DBAs can set up a “test master” database by refreshing a production database and mark the “test master” as the source of functional clones. Self-service users can create multiple copies of the test-master in minutes without consuming additional space beyond what’s needed to make localized updates. This can be really beneficial for applications where the testing is primarily read-only and is limited to a subset of the data. Users can also take backups (snapshots) of their database and “time travel” across snapshots to restore the database to an earlier incarnation in a matter of minutes.

For more involved testing, such as testing production loads with lots of updates, Oracle Enterprise Manager also supports a full clone using the RMAN technology.

The following picture highlights the various use cases of DBaaS that Oracle Enterprise Manager addresses. While each of these have specific applicability, Oracle Enterprise Manager handles all these use cases comprehensively.

+ Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c has added support for building and managing Infrastructure as a Service clouds based on the latest Oracle VM 3.2.1 release. The updated kernel and enhanced storage management features in Oracle VM 3.2.1 make it an ideal foundation for building a secure, scalable, enterprise-class infrastructure cloud. The newly released Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Plug-ins for Oracle Virtualization and Oracle Cloud provide comprehensive support for setting up the cloud infrastructure, deploying Oracle virtual assemblies and Oracle VM templates, and monitoring and managing the health of the cloud.
+ Testing as a Service (TaaS): Any enterprise application needs extensive testing before changes are rolled into production. Testing is a time-consuming process, can take weeks owing to delays in provisioning the full application stack to run the test on. QA is often left waiting on IT to provide the infrastructure and platform and sometimes this wait itself can account for 50% of the total testing cycle. Currently, no integrated solution exists that handle the provisioning and testing phases of the overall testing process leading to significant process delays and poor efficiency.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c introduces Testing as a Service, a new cloud platform for delivering automated application testing services. A self-service solution designed for private clouds, TaaS orchestrates the testing process end-to-end by automating provisioning of complete test labs (applications, test tools and assets comprising scripts and scenarios), execution of load and functional tests and rich application monitoring and diagnostics. It also includes a sophisticated chargeback facility and the ability to perform deeper diagnostics in context of testing.

TaaS makes it possible to significantly reduce testing time and costs without compromising quality, and enables organizations to be more agile in delivering critical business applications. One can find more details on TaaS here.

Oracle Enterprise Manager’s cloud management features are also enabled through a set of powerful RESTful APIs, which are summarized in this presentation. These APIs can be consumed from custom or 3rd party orchestration frameworks. In the new release, one can also orchestrate these APIs using an Oracle Enterprise manager provided framework called Blueprints. Using Blueprints, one can orchestrate the provisioning of a multi-layered application (such as the one shown below). One can download the documentation and sample code for the blueprints from here.

+ New Management Plug-Ins: The following new and updated plug-Ins are now available as part of this release. In addition to providing new and enhanced functionality as mentioned above, the plug-ins incorporate numerous bug fixes.

Plug-In Name / Version
*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database (DB) 12.1.0.3 (new)
*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization (VT) 12.1.0.4 (new)
*Enterprise Manager Storage Management Framework (SMF) 12.1.0.1 (new)
*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud (SSA) 12.1.0.5 (new)

Read More:
* New book: Building and Managing a Cloud Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (Oracle Press)

*Cloud Management page on OTN

*Enterprise Manager 12c: Cloud Management Pack for DB Datasheet

*Enterprise Manager 12c: The Nerve Center of Oracle Cloud Technical White Paper

Good Feedback

2013-01-31T12:08:00.000+08:00

Good Feedback on my book from a reader in the USA:
"I must mention that this is THE book I have ever read and digested in the field of cloud control through Oracle Enterprise Manager, I am very impressed how categorically it has explained the core details."
Thanks Friend.
http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-enterprise-manager-12c-cloud-control/book

Answers to Your Common Database Performance Questions

2013-01-17T17:38:00.001+08:00

By Scott McNeil on Jan 15, 2013

An Interview with Oracle Database Manageability Expert, Deba Chatterjee

Throughout the year we hear from lots of customers and get many questions about managing Oracle Database. In this blog, I thought I would try and provide some answers to common diagnostics and tuning questions with the help of our product manager and residence expert for Oracle Database Manageability, Deba Chatterjee. Deba has a wealth of database performance tuning experience both inside and outside of Oracle managing large data warehouses. Deba is responsible for Oracle Diagnostics Pack for Database and Oracle Tuning Pack for Database. I recently sat down with Deba and had a chat about database manageability.

Scott McNeil: Deba, we get many people asking questions about database performance—many still don't know about all the deep diagnostics capabilities Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c has to offer for Oracle Database. Capabilities such as; Compare Period ADDM, Real-Time ADDM, Active Session History (ASH) Analytics Real-Time SQL Monitoring, using Metric Extensions, and SQL Tuning Advisor—how do customers get all these capabilities for their database?

Deba Chatterjee: We recently ran a webcast: Maximize Oracle Database Performance with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Top 10 Tips and Tricks that explains how many of these features work. I highly recommend people watch the webcast to get a better understanding of the capabilities you mentioned. But the short answer is: for Compare Period ADDM, Real-Time ADDM, Metric Extensions you need to license Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Diagnostics Pack for Database. For Real-Time SQL Monitoring, SQL Tuning Advisor, you will need the Oracle Tuning Pack for Database.

Scott McNeil: Another question customers repeatedly ask is around Cloud Control and Database Control. Deba, can you explain the difference between Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (formerly Grid Control) and Database Control.

Deba Chatterjee: Although they belong to the same family of products there is a fundamental difference between the two. Database Control can be used to manage only a single database with which it has been configured, while Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c allows you to manage all your databases under the same centralized management console. Plus Cloud Control lets you manage not only all your databases but your entire application and technology stack too, whether it's in a private cloud or in a traditional environment.

How do you modify the Metric Value History retention in Enterprise Manager? For example; Enterprise Manager only shows the last 7 days, how do you display longer than 7 days?

Deba Chatterjee: There are various retention times based on the type of metric data:

Raw metric data: default retention time is 7 days
Hourly aggregated metric data: default retention is 31 days
Daily aggregated metric data: default retention is 12 months

Refer to the documentation here, if you want to change the default retention time.

For Compare Period ADDM, how do you relate that in the context of system load?

Deba Chatterjee: In the resource usage tab, you can check the system CPU, Memory, I/O and interconnect (for RAC databases) utilizations across the 2 comparison periods in the same database.

Does Compare Period ADDM take into account the average read and average write in order to identify why the variance is happening in performance?

Deba Chatterjee: Compare Period ADDM uses database time to compare the performance across two periods. It does not compare based on average read or write times.

Does Enterprise Manager have the ability to create customized performance graphs? For example; can you create a graph for CPU usage in the last 24 hours on a given Host?

Deba Chatterjee: This is possible through the information publisher or BI publisher reports. As for the CPU usage, the chart is available out-of-the box in the target page for hosts.

How do you connect to the database itself when it’s hung and won't allow any extra connections? Do you use command line? Can you use ADDM even though the database is hung?

Deba Chatterjee: When the database is hung, you can connect to it using the diagnostic connection mode in Real-Time ADDM. The agent that is used to monitor the database makes the connection. No, command line is used. You have to use Real-Time ADDM for the connection.

Is Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c compatible with older versions of the database?

Deba Chatterjee: You can use Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to monitor Oracle Database versions: 9.2.0.8, 10.1.0.5, 10.2.0.4, 10.2.0.5, 11.1.0.7, 11.2.0.1, 11.2.0.2, and 11.2.0.3.

Is SQL Performance Analyzer part of Oracle Database 11g or do you need to use Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c?

Deba Chatterjee: SQL Performance Analyzer is built into the database and provides command line APIs. However, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides the complete orchestration needed to capture the SQL tuning set, run the performance trials, and then to create a performance comparison report.

How do you enable Enterprise Manager to monitor and send alerts to the DBAs for a "Runaway Query?”

Deba Chatterjee: You can use EM to monitor runaway queries and send alerts using Metric Extensions which rely on the data captured in SQL Monitoring. The method was explained in this webcast presentation.

How do you create a report for all the SQL running in an instance during a 30 minute timeframe? Can you export this to a spreadsheet?

Deba Chatterjee: ASH stores sampled (1 seconds in memory or 10 seconds on-disk) SQL. However ASH is meant to capture the high load SQL statements so it won’t have all SQL statements.

Do you recommend enabling automatic gathering of SQL baselines as a preventative measure of SQL regression?

Deba Chatterjee: No. This would be overkill. Identify the queries that frequently change plans and then create SQL plan baselines.

If a server has multiple database instances, what is the best way to effectively do resource allocation?

Deba Chatterjee: There is no silver bullet. Carefully study your database load and decide on use of services, instance caging and resource managers to manage load on servers.

When using SQL Performance Analyzer, do you create the baseline first before the code change is deployed or at peak DB time?

Deba Chatterjee: These are two different problems. While testing for Code change, the baseline should be created before the code is deployed. While testing for an upgrade scenario the baseline needs to be created at a peak DB time.

Is there a metric to monitor ASM disk group utilization at the cluster level?

Deba Chatterjee: Yes. ASM Disk Group Usage metric is what you can use. (See image below)

Can Oracle Enterprise Manager’s alerts be configured to monitor elements in the audit trail such as table creation or table drop?

Deba Chatterjee: Yes, these type of alerts can be configured using Metric Extensions.

By Scott McNeil on Jan 15, 2013

Printing Errata

2013-01-12T18:51:00.001+08:00

I have received a copy of my new EM12c book
and while going through it, I found a printing error on page 308.
This is in Chapter 10 which is titled "Ease the Chaos with
Exadata Management". On page 308, there are two paragraphs on the page
(2nd and 3rd paragraphs from the top of the page) that mention that
the “BP1” patch is recommended. The same page also mentions in the fourth
paragraph that Release 2 is recommended. The paragraphs mentioning BP1
were supposed to be removed during the final edit, however due to a
edtorial slip they were not. This is confusing to the reader since
there are two conflicting recommendations on the same page. So,
I have decided to make things clear to the reader.

The paragraphs that should be ignored/removed are as follows:

"For Exadata discovery, the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12cinstallation is
recommended to be on Bundle Patch 1(BP1)if it is not already on that patch level.
Note that applying the BP1 will not change the EM12cversion, since it is not a new
release or even a patch set of Enterprise Manager. The method to verify that the bundle
patch has been applied is to use the opatch utility in the OMS home. In the opatch
output, you should see that the BP1 patch has been applied, which is patch 13242773.

"Otherwise, please refer to the My Oracle Support(MOS)reference document for
applying the BP1 patch. The document ID is 1393173.1, and it is titled Enterprise
Manager Cloud Control Workbook for Applying Bundle Patch 1 (February 2012) and
12.1.0.2 Plugins."

Please ignore these paragraphs. I have asked for them to be removed in all
future printed versions of the book and also the e-book version.

My new EM12c Book Now Available

2012-12-20T10:57:00.002+08:00

Friends,

I am pleased to say that my new EM12c book has finally been published and is now available, both as a printed book and as an e-book.

http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-enterprise-manager-12c-cloud-control/book
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos

This is the first published EM12c book in the world.

Among the many positive comments I have received, a DBA says "yes,i have already bought a copy of the book. Its really good ....Thanks for publishing such a Good book on Enterprise Manager 12c."

Please have a look at the updated chapter of contents:

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Chaos at Data Centers
Chapter 2: Enter Oracle Cloud Control
Chapter 3: Ease the Chaos with Performance Management
Chapter 4: Ease the Chaos with Configuration Management and Security Compliance
Chapter 5: Ease the Chaos with Automated Provisioning
Chapter 6: Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching
Chapter 7: Ease the Chaos with Change Management
Chapter 8: Ease the Chaos with Test Data Management
Chapter 9: Ease the Chaos with Data Masking
Chapter 10: Ease the Chaos with Exadata Management
Chapter 11: Real-life Examples and Case Studies, and It's a Wrap: The Future is the Cloud
Index

Preface

Chapter 1: Chaos at Data Centers
Team effort
Common solutions used in data centers
Summary

Chapter 2: Enter Oracle Cloud Control
The Grid – where the cloud came from
Overview of version 12c
Striking new features in 12c
Bonus sections

Chapter 3: Ease the Chaos with Performance Management
Laying the foundation
Top activity
Testing infrastructure changes
SQL Monitoring
Doctor in the database
Real-Time ADDM
Compare Period ADDM
Active Session History (ASH) analytics
Summary

Chapter 4: Ease the Chaos with Configuration Management and Security Compliance
Lifecycle management
Auto discovery
Inventory
Detailed configuration
Search capability
History and compares
Topology
Custom configurations
Client configurations
Compliance
Compliance library
Configuration and compliance reporting
Summary

Chapter 5: Ease the Chaos with Automated Provisioning
Lifecycle management
First steps: Software Library
Provisioning library
Provisioning profiles
Deployment procedures
Customization
Lock down
Configuration details
Compliance standards
Granting permissions to the Provisioning Operator
Running EM as the Provisioning Operator
Running the procedure
Other possibilities
Summary

Chapter 6: Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching
Recommended patches
Patch plan
Out-of-place patching
Pre-patching analysis
Deployment
Plan template
Patching roles
Refreshes
Other patching procedures
Reporting
Summary

Chapter 7: Ease the Chaos with Change Management
Change management
Schema comparison
Schema Change Plan
Schema synchronization
Synchronization rules and mode
Synchronization results
Executing the synchronization
Synchronization without a Change Plan
Data comparison
Continuous comparison
Use cases
Summary

Chapter 8: Ease the Chaos with Test Data Management
Test Data Management
Creating packages
Creating the Application Data Model
Data subsetting
Applications
Table rules
Rule parameters
Space estimates
Pre/Post subset script
Generate subset
Benefits and capabilities
Summary

Chapter 9: Ease the Chaos with Data Masking
Finding sensitive data
Creating data masking definitions
New capabilities
Adding columns to mask
Defining the masking format
Advanced options
Generated Script
Scheduling the job
Testing the results
Format library
Benefits and capabilities
Summary

Chapter 10: Ease the Chaos with Exadata Management
Meeting the challenges
Discovering Exadata
Adding the hosts
Adding non-host targets
Adding the cluster and databases
Monitoring and managing Exadata
Database machine resource utilization
Exadata grid
Infiniband network
Database performance pages
Total capabilities
Summary

Chapter 11: Real-life Examples and Case Studies, and It's a Wrap: The Future is the Cloud
Case study – telecom
Case study – pharmaceutical
Case study – computer manufacturer
Case study – online store
Case study – financial institution
Case study – university
Future of cloud computing
Summary

Index

You can get the book via the Packt website, or, if you prefer Amazon, the Paperback version is available, or the Kindle version. Packt also has a PDF version.

Enjoy the world of Enterprise Manager.

Regards,

Porus.

Latest List of Published White Papers and Articles

2012-11-29T12:32:00.000+08:00

A number of my readers have asked me for a full list of all my published technical articles/white papers on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), for easy reference. Here is the latest list as of November 2012. I have placed the white papers at the top, and the articles are in chronological order in the article list. The latest articles on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, published in October 2012 and December 2012, are right at the bottom of the list. A couple of the earlier articles were even in the most popular OTN article list in 2009.

My Published White Papers on Oracle Technology Network (OTN)

White Paper: Advanced Uses of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g
White Paper: Managing Oracle Applications with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

My Published Articles on Oracle Technology Network (OTN)
Using Grid Control with Filer Snapshotting (republished in 12c version, link below)
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture for Very Large Sites
Oracle RMAN Backups: Pushing the "Easy" Button
Patch a Thousand Databases, Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control
Easy Disaster Proof Production with Grid Control
Using Oracle GoldenGate for Real-Time Data Integration

Mask Your Secrets Using Oracle Enterprise Manager

Manage Mass Provisioning Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control

Overview of Oracle EM Management Packs

Provision Your Oracle RAC Systems Using Oracle Enterprise Manager
NEW!! Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c
NEW!! Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c with Filer Snapshotting

Happy Reading!!

New Enterprise Manager Article published on Oracle Technical Network (OTN)

2012-10-22T11:21:00.001+08:00

Friends,

I am pleased to announce that a new article of mine has been published in October 2012 on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN).

Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching:
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/havewala-patching-oem12c-1864147.html

This is excerpted from my new book "Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos", published by Packt Publishing. Enjoy the world of Enterprise Manager!!

Regards,

Porus.

Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness

2012-10-15T13:44:00.000+08:00

By Sudip Datta on Oct 09, 2012

Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published.

I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management?

VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas:

Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects
Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris.
DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects
APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service
Java Developers looking for a runtime platform
QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment

If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter.

DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed.

When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above.

Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base !

In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and demos for starters with EM 12c.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/cloud-mgmt/index.html

Sudip Datta

(Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Enterprise Manager)

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

HDFC Bank about their DBaaS Implementation in India

2012-10-15T13:07:00.002+08:00

HDFC Bank in India (2nd largest private sector bank) went live recently on a combination of Exadata and Enterprise Manager 12c, to run their internal Databases as a Service (DBaaS) cloud. They were very successful in this venture and presented on the same at the recent Oracle Open World (OOW). You can download their very interesting presentation from either of the following links:

MediaFire:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/fc3tqpc9ek8etcc/HDFC_Bank_DBaaS_Presentation_in_OOW.pdf

Ge.tt:
http://ge.tt/8RwSqVP/v/0?c

The presentation speaks for itself. One of the main reasons for them to go the DBaaS way, was to increase business agility and the presentation is very effective in establishing the DBaaS solution as crucial to their agility. The drivers for DBaaS for them were:

- the need to be more agile as the business wants to launch new schemes all the time which require some changes to the DB / Application.

- each time they have to launch such a scheme, they have to create a copy of the DB and test the changes

- this takes time because setting up a DB from scratch takes some effort (not to mention expensive third-party SI resources which get charged to the bank of course, and human errors which can delay the test)

- this is a dynamic market where even a few days make a big difference so time to market is crucial

- such companies need a solution to provision databases on demand automatically for testing changes in the shortest possible time.

The Oracle DBaaS solution helps them cut the time from 56 days (if testing hardware is not ready available. It is 3.5 days even if h/w is available) to 3 hrs. This solution therefore saves critical Go To Market time in addition to reducing third-party SI costs, and improving hardware utilization. They have used the Cloud Management pack in EM12c to manage the DBaaS in addition to tracking usage by each department so that they can be charged for the use of the same.

This is a story that would impress most large companies that have a large number of databases and have to make frequent changes to them to be more agile. Let me know if you want more details.

I am pleased to say that 6 years ago, I had introduced Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control to the DBA team in HDFC Bank to set up their RMAN backups, and also demonstrated cloning of databases to them using Grid Control. Nilanjay of HDFC bank has graciously acknowledged that their Enterprise Manager journey started with me, all triggered post working with me 5-6 years back. Thanks Nilanjay for your graciousness.

The video of the OOW presentation by HDFC bank can now be seen on :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwe_11tNPRk

Regards,

Porus.

Capacity Planning for the Cloud, and General Capacity Planning

2012-09-28T10:53:00.001+08:00

A friend wrote " I could not find any information on capacity planning (database) in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. The only information i could get is that, it is part of the "Chargeback and Capacity Planning" plugin. There is no documentation available on this. One of my customer was using this feature in 10g and 11g.. and now have moved to 12c and are unable to figure it out. Any pointers would be of great help."

My answer:

There is no capacity planner in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c right now. There is a consolidation planner. This is not a general capacity planning tool but rather a consolidation tool to access your current server workloads (CPU or memory or Network IO etc), and mathematically calculate if they can be consolidated to a physical or virtual consolidation target(s) that you specify. The SPECint benchmark is used in the case of CPU comparisons.

So far as the Chargeback and Capacity Planning Plugin that you mention, this does offer a view of the CPU and Memory etc TRENDS across the cloud infrastructure to the cloud administrator, so that the cloud admin can judge the capacity usage of the infrastructure and plan ahead for cloud infrastructure upgrades. So in that sense, it allows cloud capacity planning.,

Right now, metric historical data in EM 12c can be extracted and used for capacity planning by any customer in an external spreadsheet.

Regards,

Porus.
http://enterprise-manager.blogspot.com

Oracle EM 12c Release 2 Now Available

2012-09-18T12:44:00.000+08:00

Last week, on September 13 2012, Oracle announced general availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2. The release introduces unique capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Release 2 is now available on the OTN Download Page. This is the first major release since the EM 12c launch in October of 2011. This release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. It is also the first ever Enterprise Manager release available on all platforms simultaneously.

Installation and Upgrade:

All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) )
Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2.
Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: The user can do a fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory).
Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade.

Documentation:

The Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights "What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. The direct link for what's new is : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/doc.121/e25353/whats_new.htm#CEGIFFGA

You can easily upgrade EM Release I to EM Release II by following the instructions in the Upgrade guide at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/upgrade.121/e22625/toc.htm

You can also watch the upgrade webcast on the OTN at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/grid-control/ondemand-webcast-100686.html

All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN

New Capabilities and Features Increase Cloud Control: There are enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds.Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle WebLogic Server, including guided set up of a PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out, and metering and chargeback;

Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server enables synchronized patching and configuration file management to help ease management of multi-domain web environments;

Integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components.

New management capabilities for business-critical applications include: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application's business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on;

Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context.

Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, and bulk operations against many events, etc.

New and Revised Plug-Ins:

Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions.

Plug-In Name	Version
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database	12.1.0.2 (revision)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware	12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning	12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications	12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization	12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata	12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud	12.1.0.4 (new)

Photos and Download PDF for Bangkok Customer and Partner Seminars on EM Cloud Control 12c

2012-09-18T11:38:00.003+08:00

Friends,

Here are some photos on the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview/New Features seminar that we recently conducted in Bangkok, Thailand. The first day was for Oracle Partners, the second for Oracle Customers.

We covered the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview, Architecture, Database Lifecycle Management pack, Test Data Management pack, Oracle Cloud Overview, and New features of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in all of these. We also spoke on the Diagnostics/Tuning packs and Data Masking packs.

The updated PDF can be downloaded from this Mediafire link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?l25h2chvyv3ocvc

This is the Oracle Customer Seminar Photo:

This is the Oracle Partner Seminar Photo:

Regards,

Porus.

Oracle Cloud Builder Summit—Your Fast Track to the Enterprise Private Cloud

2012-08-17T23:49:00.002+08:00

Oracle customers are invited to the Oracle Cloud Builder Summit events happening across the region. We’ll show them how to build—in only two hours—an enterprise cloud environment, as well as how to:

Build and operate clouds
Efficiently consolidate onto shared, scalable cloud platforms and infrastructure
Secure and integrate clouds

This content-rich event will feature multiple demonstrations, customers will learn how to fast-track applications to cloud with Oracle, and support every aspect of planning, deploying, monitoring, and managing enterprise clouds.

http://www.oracle.com/goto/cloudevents

I was "Ed" in the seminar in Jakarta, demonstrating how to build the cloud in two hours. I am going to be "Ed" again in Singapore. Have a look at the event schedule.

Bangkok, September 12: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop

2012-08-13T18:06:00.000+08:00

If you are in Bangkok, Thailand on September 12, this is my upcoming seminar. Please register if you would like to attend. Totally free!!

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=155823&src=7599523&src=7599523&Act=19

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

9:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Oracle Thailand
Conference Room 1 & 2
16th Floor, Ramaland Bldg,
952 Rama IV Road, Bangkok 10500

Overview
Join us for a very interesting Overview of the latest Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the recommended architecture for using Enterprise Manager, an explanation of the most popular EM capabilities, and a walkthrough of the Database Lifecycle Management pack which provides capabilities for database/ server/ OS configuration management, database provisioning and patch automation, and database change management (schema level changes and comparisons).

Attend this seminar to get an idea of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the new Test Data Management Pack (used for data subsetting). We will also touch on Oracle and the Cloud. We will go through, in detail, the New Features in the Cloud Control 12c version.

In all, this is a very well-rounded presentation on Enterprise Manager to give a solid idea of what this product is about. A Live Demo of the main features is included using Oracle’s Demonstration systems in the USA.

The seminar is conducted by Porus Homi Havewala, who is a Double Oracle Certified Master (OCM 10g &11g), Oracle ACE, and author of several popular OTN Articles and White papers, and also two popular books on Oracle Enterprise Manager. He has 18+ years of experience with Oracle technology and 26+ years in the IT industry.

Please see the link for further details.

Regards,

Porus.

Incident Management in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

2012-08-04T11:41:00.001+08:00

By Anand Akela on Jul 24, 2012

Contributed by Pete Sharman , Principal Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (EM12c) is a huge release, both in terms of its adoption rate (that is, its uptake in the market) and the amount of functionality included in the product. For those of us that have been around for a long time, it’s very reminiscent of the massive functionality leap from Oracle RDBMS version 6 to version 7 – a quantum leap that makes it difficult to even grasp the breadth of the product now.

To try and make the new features a bit more understandable, I’ll be writing a number of blog entries over the coming months to highlight just some of my favourite new features for EM12c. From an administrator’s perspective, one of those standout features (and the subject of today’s entry) has to be incident management.

The goal of incident management is to enable administrators to monitor and resolve service disruptions that may be occurring in their data centre as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead of managing the numerous discrete individual events that may be raised as the result of any of these service disruptions, we want to manage a smaller number of more meaningful incidents, and to manage them based on business priority across the lifecycle of those incidents.

To do this, Enterprise Manager now provides a centralized incident console called Incident Manager that will enable the administrator to track, diagnose, and resolve incidents, as well as providing features to help rectify the root causes of recurrent incidents. Incident Manager also directly leverages Oracle’s own expertise via My Oracle Support knowledge base articles and documentation to enable administrators to accelerate the process of diagnosing and resolving incidents and problems. Finally, Incident Manager also offers the ability to do lifecycle operations for incidents, so you can assign ownership of an incident to a specific user, acknowledge an incident, set priority for an incident, track an incident’s status, escalate an incident or suppress it so you can defer it to a later time. You can also raise notifications on an incident or open a helpdesk ticket via the helpdesk connectors.

Events

Enterprise Manager continues to be the primary tool for managing and monitoring the Oracle data center, so it manages and monitors Oracle applications as well as the application stack from presentation layer to middleware, databases to hosts and the operating system, as well as non-Oracle technology. When Enterprise Manager detects issues in any of this infrastructure, it raises events. Sample events might be:

1. Metric alerts (for example, CPU utilization or tablespace usage alerts) where a critical threshold you set has been crossed

2. Job events – events are raised by the job system for job statuses that you specify, for example an event is raised to signal the failure of a job.

3. Standards violations – if you are using compliance standards and any of the targets that are being monitored violate any of the compliance standards, then a standards violation event could be raised.

4. Availability events – if a target is down and Enterprise Manager detects that, an availability event that the target is down can be raised

5. Other events – there are other types of events that occur as well

All these events signal particular issues have occurred in the managed data centre. As an administrator, you really want to be able to determine which of these events are significant. From these significant events, you then want to be able to correlate discrete events that are related to the same underlying issue, so you in fact have to manage a smaller number of significant incidents.

Incidents

An incident could then be defined as an object containing a significant event (such as a target being down, for example) or it could be a combination of events that all relate to the same issue (for example, running out of space could be detected by Enterprise Manager as separate events raised from the database, host and storage target types). For example, you may have a performance incident that amalgamates a number of performance events, another incident related to space, and a different incident based on availability problems.

Sound good? OK, so how do we do this? Well, events are significant occurrences in your IT infrastructure and that Enterprise Manager detects and raises. Each event has a set of attributes– what type of event it is, the severity (fatal, critical and so on), the object or entity on which the event is raised (typically a target but it can also be a job or some other object), the message associated with the event, the timestamp at which it occurred, as well as the functional category (such as availability, security etc.)

Some examples of the different types of events include:

· Target availability: raised when a target is down or has gone into an agent unreachable state.

· Metric alert: raised when a metric crosses its threshold.

· Job status change: raised, for example, when a job fails.

· Compliance standard rule: raised when a compliance standard rule is violated.

· Metric evaluation: raised when there is an error with the evaluation of a metric.

· Other events such as SLA Alert, High Availability and Compliance Standard Score violation can also be raised, and of course, users can cause an event to be raised.

Associated with these event types are event severities. The first of these, “Fatal”, is a new severity level in Enterprise Manager specifically associated with the target availability event type for when the target is down. Critical and warning events have the same meaning as they had in previous releases, and then we have the Advisory level. Typically, this is associated with non-service-impacting events such as compliance standard violation events. The informational level is an event severity used to indicate simply that an event has occurred, but there is no need to do anything about it.

As we discussed previously, an actual incident will contain one or more events. Let’s look at the details of an incident with one event. For example, Figure 1 shows us an availability event:

Figure 1: Incident with one event

The event signals that the database DB1 is down and includes a timestamp of when the event was raised. Because this is a target availability event and the database is down, the severity is marked as Fatal. An incident can be created for that event, so the incident contains only one event. In order to manage and track the resolution of the incident, the incident has other attributes such as owner (the Enterprise Manager user that is working on the incident), status, incident severity (which is based on the event severity), priority and a comment field.

Many incidents will instead contain multiple events, where those events are related and pointed to the same underlying cause. In the example shown in Figure 2, we have two metric alert events on a host target -- a memory utilization metric alert event and a CPU utilization metric alert event because the host is starting to suffer from heavy load. We have a warning severity memory utilization metric alert event, and a short time later a critical severity CPU utilization metric alert event.

Figure 2: Incident with multiple events

An incident can be created containing both events in order to manage and track the resolution of the incident. In the current release, the administrator needs to manually combine events into an incident in the Enterprise Manager console (the automatic grouping of related events into an incident is a future enhancement). Again, we have additional attributes associated with the incident like we had in the previous example. Enterprise Manager automatically assigns the incident severity, based on the worst case event severity of all the events contained in the incident. Since the worst event severity is Critical, the incident severity is also set to Critical. Finally, the incident has a summary which is a short description of what the incident is about. The individual events are indicating the machine load is high so you can set the summary to that. Alternatively, you can set the incident summary to be the same as the event messages.

If you are using one of the helpdesk connectors to interface to a helpdesk system, an incident might also result in a helpdesk ticket which can allow the helpdesk analyst to work on the ticket. Within Enterprise Manager, we’ll be able to track both the ticket number and the status of that particular ticket.

Problems

A problem is the underlying root cause of an incident. In Enterprise Manager terms, a problem is specifically related to either an Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) incident or Oracle software incident. Enterprise Manager will automatically create a problem whenever it detects an ADR incident has been raised. An ADR incident can be thought of as a critical Oracle software problem where the resolution of the software problem typically involves contacting Oracle Support, opening a service request and possibly receiving a patch for that problem.

Whenever an ADR incident is raised, we generate one incident in Enterprise Manager for that ADR incident, and we also automatically generate a problem as well. All the ADR incidents that have the same problem signature (that is, the same root cause) will be linked into a single problem object. The administrator can manage the problem in Incident Manager in the same way as you would manage an incident, so you can assign an owner to the problem, track the resolution and so on. In addition, there are in-context links to Support Workbench functionality which allows the administrator to package the diagnostic material, open a service request and view the status of diagnostic activity such as the SR number and ultimately bug number (if one is generated) within the user interface.

Figure 3 shows a diagrammatic example of how incidents and problems are related. Two ADR incidents have occurred, in this example two ORA-600 errors have occurred in my database. Both of these incidents are of critical severity. Enterprise Manager automatically creates a problem containing those incidents. Within the Incident Manager interface you can link to the Support Workbench to open a service request which you can then track from Incident Manager.

Figure 3: Incidents and problems

So now you have an understanding of the terminology and relationships between these terms, what’s next? Well, the next thing to understand is just how you deal with these incidents. That will be the topic of my next post, so stay tuned for more!

Contributed by Pete Sharman , Principal Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager

Photos and Download PDF for Manila seminars on EM Cloud Control 12c

2012-07-25T20:44:00.004+08:00

Friends,

Here are some photos on the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview/New Features seminar that I recently conducted in Manila, Philipines. The first day was for Oracle Partners, the second for Oracle Customers.

We covered the EM 12c Overview, Architecture, Database Lifecycle Management pack, Test Data Management pack, Oracle Cloud Overview, and New features of Enterprise Manager 12c in all of these. We also spoke on the Diagnostics/Tuning packs and Data Masking packs.

The updated PDF can be downloaded from this Mediafire link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?l25h2chvyv3ocvc

Oracle Customer Seminar Photo:

Oracle Partner Seminar Photos:

Regards,

Porus.

Manila, July 25: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop

2012-07-16T18:48:00.000+08:00

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=155824&src=7599523&src=7599523&Act=20

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
09:30 a.m. – 01:00 p.m.

Oracle Philippines
Conference Room 1 & 2
19th Floor, Pacific Star Building,
Senator Gil J. Puyat corner Makati Avenues,
Makati City, Metro Manila 1200

New EM 12c plug-ins

2012-07-15T12:56:00.003+08:00

Announcing the release of following EM 12c plug-ins: · Enterprise Manager for Microsoft Active Directory · Enterprise Manager for Microsoft Biz Talk Server · Enterprise Manager for Microsoft .Net Framework · Enterprise Manager for Microsoft IIS
12.1.0.1.0 version of these plug-ins are being released for the first time, on top of 12c Framework. These are certified to work with 12101/12101BP1 Platform and require Windows Agent. The new plug-ins are now available from self-update.

Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

2012-07-05T00:50:00.000+08:00

Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

By Gagan Chawla on Jul 04, 2012

Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform.

Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities.

In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement -

Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage.
Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase -
- Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install
- Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install
- Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options
- Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup
Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation.
Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’.
Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c.
Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets.
Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations.
Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud.
Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table.
Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide
Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework.
GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud.

Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project!

In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud –

DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle
‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud
Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c.

More Information –

The Enterprise Manager Video series

2012-06-25T10:40:00.001+08:00

Have a look at the The Enterprise Manager Video series on You Tube. Interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL172B9B9DF2DC0D08&feature=plpp

Regards,

Porus.