What's New in Enterprise Manager 10.2

Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g Release 4 (10.2.0.4) includes many new features that add to your ability to monitor and manage your enterprise:

Grid Management Features

• System Monitoring: Lights-out, comprehensive monitoring of all components of the Oracle ecosystem. Alert handling flexibility is improved through repeating notifications. This feature allows administrators to be e-mailed at regular intervals until an alert is acknowledged. Administrators can acknowledge an alert as a convenient way of indicating that they have looked at an alert.

• Privilege Delegation Providers: Administrative security and flexibility are enhanced through support for privilege delegation providers for executing jobs and patching targets from Enterprise Manager. A privilege delegation provider allows a logged in administrator using his account to be authorized to execute a specific action based on a subset of privileges delegated from another account. Super Administrators can now set up regular administrator accounts to leverage the two supported privilege delegation providers: Sudo and PowerBroker.

• Enterprise Manager Audit Framework: Enhanced auditing capability increases tracking flexibility and utility by allowing Enterprise Manager administrators to define custom audit attributes in addition to the standard "out-of-box" attributes. Users can now enter text strings such as a work order number before performing actions in Enterprise Manager in order to have that custom string associated with all the audit records associated with that action, creating a richer audit trail.

• Compare Monitoring Templates: See at a glance how metric and policy settings defined in a template differ from those defined on destination targets.

• Bare-Metal Provisioning: Automatically deploy new fully configured systems, including operating systems and software images. Clone existing installations and software images (such as Oracle Cluster Ready Services (CRS), Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Oracle Application Server).

• Oracle Real Application Clusters Provisioning and Conversion: Automatically configure Oracle RAC database instances to dynamically increase database capacity to meet your needs; convert non-RAC databases to Oracle RAC databases.

• Cloning: Simplify deployment of Oracle solutions by cloning fully patched and tested Oracle homes to multiple hosts; clone database instances to create backups of important databases; create new single-node Oracle RAC by cloning an existing RAC Oracle home.

• Lights-Out Patching: Quickly identify available patches for the components in your enterprise. Find out which have not been applied and which are critical. Bring those components up to the latest patch level with just a few clicks.

• Policy-Based Monitoring: Apply consistent, proactive management practices across your enterprise using policies and management templates.

• Policy Groups: Policy groups are standards by which targets are measured. The rules within a policy group are managed as a set; that is, they are viewed, maintained, evaluated, and reported in the context of a group. In contrast, policy rules are not evaluated as a set. Policy rules are viewed, maintained, and evaluated as standalone entities. Oracle provides the following policy groups: Secure Configuration for Oracle Database, Secure Configuration for Oracle Real Application Cluster, and Secure Configuration for Oracle Listener.

• Security Assessment: Automatically assess the security vulnerabilities in your enterprise using the Critical Patch Facility, which provides notifications and a direct link to Oracle Support. Enhanced security rules harden the infrastructure database and host. Violation score reporting helps administrators prioritize security operations.

• Job System: More powerful, feature-rich job system allows you to schedule and run multi-task jobs across multiple targets, as well as receive notifications.

• Group Management: Enhanced group management features enable administrators to manage many components as one. Group pages roll up critical management information, such as overall status and group status history, open alerts and alert history, open policy violations and policy trend overview charts, and out-of-box group performance charts. Simplifies common administrative tasks, such as running jobs, executing custom SQL or host commands, and scheduling maintenance windows. A group "dashboard" enables proactive monitoring of status and alerts across all group members as they occur.

Service Management Features

• Services: Define services to represent the business functions or applications that run in your enterprise. Measure the performance and availability of these services, receive alerts when there is a problem, identify common issues, and diagnose causes of failures.

• Service and System Topologies: Easily define, visualize, and manage key business functions and the assets that they rely upon.

• Service Level Management: Allows you to define service-level goals for availability and performance and more quickly resolve problems through rules, reports, and historical monitoring.

• Dashboards: Offer "at-a-glance" monitoring of all critical indicators for your services and systems.

• Root Cause Analysis: Diagnose service problems quickly using the Root Cause Analysis engine.

Enterprise Reporting Features

• Out-of-Box Reports: Easy-access out-of-box reports for all Oracle components; reports on configuration, performance, service level, and audit.

• Graphical Report Creation: Easy-to-use tool to create custom reports.

• Complete Repository Access: Create reports using any data collected and stored in the Management Repository.

• Report Publishing: Proactively deliver specialized management information to users, managers, and executives using out-of-box reports, custom reports, and secure publishing features, with views accessible by any reporting product.

Database Management Features

• Oracle Real Application Clusters Management: Enhanced monitoring of Oracle RAC databases and clusters to include Interconnect monitoring, cluster cache coherency diagnostics, CRS monitoring, a graphical topology view; provision Oracle RAC deployments, convert single instances, and add nodes to existing clusters.

• Transportable Tablespaces: Allows an administrator to move tablespaces between databases.

• Fast-Start Failover: Allows Data Guard to rapidly and automatically fail over to the standby database without requiring manual intervention, significantly improving the degree of availability as well as the disaster resilience for the system infrastructure.

• Restore Points: Guaranteed recovery of the database to a particular point in time when used with Flashback Database or Flashback Table.

• Enhanced Backup Management: Provides a single view of all backups run against the databases in a domain.

• Access Advisor Enhancements: Enhanced to expose more powerful features of the Access Advisor, including template support, tuning of a single statement, journaling, recommendation implementation status, and action implementation status.

• Automatic Segment Advisor: Proactively identifies segments that have significant wasted space due to data fragmentation, which are good candidates for Online Segment Shrink. You no longer need to run Segment Advisor to determine what segments have data fragmentation.

• Online Segment Shrink Enhancements: Extends Online Segment Shrink capability to large object (LOB) segments and index-organized table (IOT) overflow segments. Online Segments Shrink capability is now extended to all types of segments, further reducing the need to perform other more advanced reorganization methods such as Online Redefinition.

• Oracle Streams: Share message information within a database or from one database to another. Control what information is put into a stream, how the stream flows from database to database, what happens to messages in the stream, and how the stream terminates.

• Adaptive Alert Thresholds: Computes statistical alert thresholds using either static (user-defined) or dynamic (self-adjusting) baselines. Dynamic statistical baselines can significantly improve the accuracy of performance alerting, while reducing exposure to the "false positives" commonly incurred under fixed threshold schemes.

Application Server Management Features

• Extended Middle Tier Management: Allows administrators to discover OracleAS Farms, OracleAS Clusters, Oracle HTTP Server High Availability Groups and OC4J High Availability Groups as composite targets and perform management and administration operations on them. Also supports discovery, management, and administration of Oracle BPEL Process Manager targets and Oracle BPEL Processes. Allows creation of infrastructure services and aggregate services. Also allows viewing of partner links associated with a BPEL process and adding of SOAP tests for them to test their availability.

• BPEL Process Provisioning Deployment Procedure: Supports deployment of BPEL processes on selected BPEL Process Managers. The BPEL process suitcase files are placed as generic components in the software library, and once it is available for deployment, the deployment procedure can be run to deploy the processes on BPEL Process Managers.

• Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Management: Supports discovery, management, and administration of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition components, mainly Oracle BI Presentation Server, Oracle BI Cluster Controller. Oracle BI Analytics Server, and Oracle BI Scheduler. Also supports discovery and monitoring of Data warehouse Application Console Server (DAC Server), which is used to create and schedule ETL task flows for Informatica server.

• Log File Rotation Jobs: Supports scheduled rotation of log files of OracleAS components to a default or user-defined location. Allows adding of a log rotation job as part of a multi-task job and saving of this job to the library.

• MQ Series Support: Supports discovery and monitoring of IBM WebSphere MQ Queue Managers and IBM WebSphere MQ Clusters. Also allows monitoring of their logical objects such as Queues and Channels.

• JBoss Application Server Management: Supports discovery, management, and administration of JBoss Application Servers and JBoss Partitions. Also allows refreshing of JBoss Partition membership to reflect the current deployment state.

• Microsoft Exchange Server Management: Supports discovery, management, and administration of Microsoft Exchange Organizations, Microsoft Exchange Routing Groups, and Microsoft Exchange Servers.

• Automatic Creation of System and Services: Supports automatic creation of a system and service from a J2EE or Web application after checking for dependencies. Allows creation of a service with a new or existing system based on the dependency mapping available. Also allows update of an existing service and system.

• Configuration Management: Extended configuration management support for OracleAS deployments. Collect, search, track, compare, and report on all OracleAS hardware and software installation configurations. Maintain a central inventory of software configuration data of core components for all OracleAS instances. Also provides this support for BEA WebLogic Managed Server, Apache HTTP Server, and IBM Websphere Application Server deployments.

  As part of the configuration management tasks, you can also view the BPEL Processes, its different versions, and the suitcase files associated with each version. You can also compare the BPEL Process suitcase files of different versions and track the changes that were made to a version. This allows you to track changes and identify the cause for changed behavior of the BPEL Process.

• Topology Views: Provides graphical topology view of AS Farms, Clusters, and ASs, with current status, alerts and policy violations, and performance metrics. View by host, by request routing overview, or request routing details.

• Custom Aggregate Monitoring: Define monitoring criteria for OracleAS Farms and Clusters using customizable aggregate metrics based on the statistical aggregation of individual metrics of cluster members. View aggregate metrics as an overlay of Òtop best,Ó Òtop worst,Ó or Òpeak thresholdÓ values for individual metrics.

• J2EE Application Monitoring: Hierarchical J2EE application view at the OracleAS cluster level shows performance across the OC4J instances on which it is deployed. Ability to plug customer application JMX MBeans into Grid Control.

• Backup and Restore: Supports full and incremental online backup of middle tier installations. Automatically recover instances to the last full backup, then apply incremental backups.

• OPMN Jobs: Supports immediate or scheduled full process control (start, stop, restart) of OPMN managed components from Grid Control.

• Provisioning "Gold" Images: Save standard reference images of application server targets to the central Software Library and deploy to target locations. Standardize the deployments of the application server targets in your enterprise. Create and extend OracleAS Cluster environments by creating new clusters or adding nodes to existing clusters.

• Cloning: Extended cloning support for different types of middle-tier installations, including WebCache, J2EE and WebCache, Portal and Wireless, Forms and Reports Services, and Business Intelligence and Forms.

Collaboration Suite Management Features

• Centralized Management: Single target subtab for Collaboration Suite from which you can view your Collaboration Suite deployment(s) and navigate to specific components.

• Automatic Discovery: Collaboration Suite server targets, such as SMTP servers and Calendar servers, are automatically discovered and monitored in Grid Control.

• Service Monitoring: In addition to monitoring server components, Grid Control also monitors Collaboration Suite services from the end-user perspective.

• Custom Service Modeling: Fast setup of services using a simple customization user interface.

• Topology Viewer: Service topology view of your Collaboration Suite deployment showing relationships between different services in Collaboration Suite.

• Root Cause Analysis: Detects the potential root causes of any service outage.

• Dashboards: Services Dashboard for monitoring service availability, performance, usage, and service-level compliance. System Dashboard for monitoring exceptions in your Collaboration Suite system.

• Client System Analyzer: Collects Windows client data and checks for minimum Collaboration Suite requirements.

Broader System Coverage

• Host Management: Out-of-box operating system, hardware, and software monitoring of the hosts on which your applications and services reside. Increased coverage for hardware monitoring, process and file-level monitoring, remote command shells, and remote file editing.

• Linux Host Administration: Host administration features for RedHat and SuSE Linux provide you the ability to administer the most important host functions easily. Using the centralized console, it is faster and less error prone to set up a server or troubleshoot problems. Operators with the appropriate privileges can set up and administer System Services, for example, start and stop individual services, and Network Setup, for example, NFS client configuration.

• Enterprise Storage Reports: Reports on allocation, utilization, roll-ups by location, line of business, application, and vendor.

• Support for Network Devices and Storage: Monitor network and storage devices, such as F5 Server Load Balancers and NetApp Filer network storage.

• Support for Non-Oracle Middleware: Support for discovery, performance monitoring, reporting, alerts, process control, and synthetic transactions for third-party application servers and application server clusters, such as IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic.

• External Product Integration: Integrate external products using command line interface, notifications, and bi-directional messages.

• E-Business Suite Management: Plug-in available to enable Grid Control to manage the Oracle Applications Manager, part of the E-Business Suite.

New Management Packs, Plug-ins, and Connectors

In addition to the six management packs available in the previous release, Enterprise Manager 10.2 offers eight new management options: five standalone management packs, five system monitoring plug-ins, and five management connectors.

• New Management Packs:

  • Oracle Service Level Management Pack

  • Oracle Configuration Pack for Non-Oracle Systems

  • Oracle Provisioning Pack

  • Oracle Business Intelligence Management Pack (see below)

  • Oracle Diagnostics Pack for Non-Oracle Middleware (see below)

• New Management Plug-ins:

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Hosts

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Non-Oracle Databases

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Non-Oracle Middleware

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Network Devices

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Storage

• New Management Connectors:

  • Management Connector for NEC Management Platforms

  • Management Connector for Hitachi Management Platforms

  • Management Connector for Fujitsu Management Platforms

  • Management Connector for Microsoft Operations Manager Management Platforms

  • Management Connector for Remedy Management Platforms

Oracle Business intelligence Management Pack

Oracle Business Intelligence Management Pack is an integrated solution for ensuring the performance and availability of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Using the pack, you can do the following:

• Receive proactive alerts on impending problems on the application.

• Examine run-time statistics to troubleshoot and tune performance.

• Compare configurations across different environments.

• Keep track of configuration changes.

• Proactively enforce configuration policies to avoid configuration-related problems.

You can use the pack with other Oracle Enterprise Manager management packs and plug-ins to achieve end-to-end management of the entire application environment, including both Oracle and non-Oracle databases, operating systems, storage, and network devices.

Key product features include:

• Application performance management

  • Dashboards and reports

  • Alert notifications

  • Historical metrics

  • Blackouts

  • O/S management

• Configuration management

  • Automatic discovery

  • Configuration snapshots

  • Configuration comparisons

  • Change history

  • Configuration policies

Oracle Diagnostics Pack for Non-Oracle Middleware

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR4 introduces the Diagnostics Pack for Non-Oracle Middleware. This pack contains the Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java (Oracle AD4J) (See the next section for more details about Oracle AD4J.) In addition to Oracle AD4J, this pack provides the following features:

• Discovery of non-Oracle middleware (Web Logic, Web Sphere, and JBoss)

• System monitoring of key performance, load, and usage metrics

• Out-of-box thresholds, events, notifications, monitoring templates, and automated corrective actions

• Real-time and historical monitoring

Oracle Application Server Diagnostics Pack — Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR4 Application Server Diagnostics Pack introduces Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java (Oracle AD4J). Oracle AD4J is a low overhead Java application monitoring and diagnostics solution that improves the availability and performance of Java applications. Highlights of the Oracle Application Server Diagnostics pack are as follows:

• Easy to deploy and no server restarts are required.

• Immediate visibility into the Java stack. No application instrumentation required provides in-depth, method-level visibility into all active transactions occurring in JVM.

• Identifies the slowest requests, slowest methods, and the bottleneck resources, such as CPU, I/O, memory, slow running or hanging threads and Database.

• Detects the memory leaks and allows administrators to perform memory leak analysis in a production environment without stopping the application. Administrators can take multiple heap snapshots over a period of time and compare them to find the Java objects leaking memory.

• Allows tracing Java requests to the associated database sessions. It highlights the slowest SQL queries and helps administrators tune SQL and the database to improve the performance application. It facilitates smooth communication between the database administrators and application administrators by isolating problems to the database or Java code.

Enhanced Management Pack for SOA

• Configuration Management: Collects configuration information for the BPEL Process Manager server, domains, and processes. The Process Manager server and domain parameters can be refreshed, saved, or compared with another target. Different versions of the same BPEL process can also be compared.

• Deployment Automation: Automates the deployment of one or more BPEL suitcases to one or more BPEL targets. Scheduling capability is also provided.

• Adapter Metrics: Throughput and error metrics for different adapters are provided in graphical format.

• Support for BPEL: In addition to existing support for BPEL 10.1.3, support for BPEL 10.1.2 and 10.1.3.3 is also provided.

Enhanced Service Level Management Pack

The Service Level Management Pack has added the following support:

• Recording Forms transactions for applications based on Forms Server 6i.

• DHTML recorder to record Web transactions for applications with more dynamic content.

Enhanced Application Management Pack for Siebel

Oracle Application Management Pack for Siebel is a complete and integrated solution for ensuring the performance and availability of Siebel applications. Using the pack, you can do the following:

• Receive proactive alerts on impending problems on the application.

• Examine run-time statistics to troubleshoot and tune performance.

• Compare configurations across different environments.

• Keep track of configuration changes.

• Proactively enforce configuration policies to avoid configuration-related problems.

• Monitor and report on the service level delivered by the application and performance diagnostics of user and server performance.

You can use this pack with other Oracle Enterprise Manager management packs and plug-ins to achieve end-to-end management of the entire application environment, including both Oracle and non-Oracle databases, operating systems, storage, and network devices.

The 10gR4 release of this pack adds integrated Siebel Transaction Diagnostic support using data captured through the Siebel Application Response Measurement (SARM) framework.With this tool, you can:

• Analyze request processing for individual user requests.

• Analyze CPU and memory consumption of processing requests for different Siebel Server Components.

• Graphically visualize SARM metric data

• Compare performance profiles over time

• Create performance reports and share them with your co-workers for collaborative performance diagnostics.

The 10gR4 version of this Siebel Transaction Diagnostic tool also adds support for Siebel 7.7 and 7.8 besides being compatible with Siebel 8.0. It is fully integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager, which eliminates the need for separate installation and user maintenance, and it runs on all operating system platforms that Oracle Enterprise Manager supports.

The older 10gR3 version of the standalone Siebel Diagnostic Tool remains to be licensed exclusively as part of the Application Management Pack for Siebel. Oracle advises that customers migrate from this standalone tool to the integrated version in 10gR4 for better functionality, performance, reliability, and compatibility.

The following tables compare various Enterprise Manager features used with the standalone Siebel Diagnostic Tool for Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR3 and the integrated version built into Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4.

SAP Monitoring Support

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 enables the monitoring of SAP R/3 applications along with other Oracle and non-Oracle technologies through a single Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control console. It provides:

• Centralized, multi-tier, multi-instance SAP R/3 monitoring.

• Discovery of SAP R/3 servers and instances for each monitored SID.

• Comprehensive, efficient, and secure health status data collection.

• End-user experience monitoring for SAP R/3 application modules.

• SAP R/3 business service dashboards and performance trend reports.