4 Enterprise Configuration Management

Hardware and Software Configurations

You can use Grid Control to view, save, track, compare, and search the configuration information stored in the Management Repository for individual hosts, databases, application servers, clients, and non-Oracle systems in the entire enterprise.

Viewing Configurations

Using Grid Control, you can perform the following actions for targets such as hosts, databases, application servers, and clients:

• View the last collected and saved configuration

• Save configurations to a configuration file or to the Management Repository

• Search collected configuration data

• View the history of configuration changes

• Compare configurations (refer to "Comparing Configurations" in this chapter for more detailed information)

See Also:

Grid Control online help for the pages described in Table 4-2

Table 4-2 Viewing Configurations for Various Targets

Target Type	Instructions for Viewing Configuration
Host	From the Home page for that host, click the Configuration subtab. For a Fusion Middleware target like WebLogic Server, navigate to the WebLogic Server Home page and select Configuration > Last Collected option from the menu.
Database	From the Database Home page, click the Maintenance subtab, then click the Last Collected Configuration link under Software Deployments, Configuration.
Application Server	From the Application Server Home page, click the Administration subtab, then click the Last Collected Configuration link under Configuration.
Client	From the Deployments tab, click the Client Configurations link.
Enterprise	From the Deployments tab, select a summary view from the View list under Deployment Summary. Summary views are provided in Table 4-3.

Figure 4-1 Host Configuration Page

Description of "Figure 4-1 Host Configuration Page"

Accessing Configuration Pages in Grid Control

To access the configuration pages in Grid Control, click the Deployments tab, then click the links found under the Configuration section:

• Search

• Compare Configurations

• Compare to Multiple Configurations (Job)

• View Saved Configurations

• Import Configuration

• Host Configuration Collection Problems

• Refresh Host Configuration

• Configuration History

These links take you to pages where you can search, view, and compare configurations for your various targets.

Configuration Change Console

Enterprise Manager Configuration Change Console supports best practices policies by enabling you to validate user actions against established IT Controls, thereby helping to reduce unauthorized change and uncontrolled access attempts made to the IT infrastructure. By automatically monitoring critical applications and infrastructure components for changes, and then comparing detected changes to planned changes, the software can track activity, generate reports, trigger alert notifications, and identify policy violations.Used as part of your IT compliance effort, the Configuration Change Console ensures adherence to internal controls supporting essential systems by monitoring, managing and auditing changes against corporate best practices policies. Although the products focus on IT control validation and compliance, they may also support other essential IT operations, including:

• Monitoring Change: Providing visibility into change in the infrastructure, and linking ticketed changes to actual changes.

• Troubleshooting/Forensics: Identifying the changes that could have contributed to outages or problems and putting safeguards in place. You even can archive critical configuration files so you can roll back problematic changes.

• Overall IT Management: Identifying trends in CPU utilization, disk utilization, and so on, for critical applications, and alerting administrators to potential problems before they cause outages.

You decide which infrastructure components you want to monitor. The Configuration Change Console collects data from those components according to the data collection rules you have defined, generates notifications according to those rules, and maintains a database of the changes made to those infrastructure components. You can then explore and analyze that data for compliance or for forensic purposes, displaying information in a time-based information model to accurately track exactly what changed and when. The user interface offers graphical visualization tools and the ability to drill down to specific devices, time intervals, and events. The solution provides both packaged and ad hoc reporting capabilities. For more details, see Configuration Change Console User's Guide.

Application Change Console

Enterprise Manager Application Configuration Console is a configuration management tool that allows you to see and manage your infrastructure configuration data in new ways. It automates the IT configuration processes required to build and maintain complex infrastructure configurations for Java EE based enterprise applications throughout their entire lifecycle.Application Configuration Console enables you to:

• Centralize your configuration management by loading configuration data from the various servers and systems into Application Configuration Console.

• Increase efficiency by arranging the configuration data to match responsibilities and workflow. Users can see configuration information arranged in a way that makes sense to them.

• Understand large and complex infrastructures by seeing visual representations of the systems in each environment side by side.

• Save time by comparing system configurations - down to the property level - with differences highlighted automatically.

• Make changes to configurations and then provision those changes out to the remote systems.

• See changes over time with automatic version tracking. Compare versions and roll back to previous versions if necessary.

• Enforce configuration standards by tracking configurations for any changes.

• Standardize deployments by creating new system configurations that are based on your gold standards and deploying those configurations to new systems.

• Allow others to view change report histories and comparisons from their Web browsers.

The tracking feature lets you see alerts and receive e-mail when there are changes to configurations or to external resources. To cut down on "false positives," that is, raising alerts unnecessarily, tracking employs a comparison strategy that considers all metadata set on assets and configurations, to see if it affects the outcome of the comparison. For example, if a container or element has the metadata COMPARISON_IGNORE_CONTAINER_INSTANCE set to TRUE, the comparison disregards the container or element.

The comparison feature lets you compare two or more containers or configurations to quickly identify configuration differences, which are often the source of problems in applications. You can compare individual configurations or entire container trees. You can also compare an asset or configuration with the external resources to see any differences between the Application Configuration Console data and the external resources.

Save a comparison so that you can easily run it again. Saved comparisons contain a list of the containers that are being compared and a list of ignored properties. You can share a saved comparison with other users so that they can run the comparison at any time. Saved comparisons can also be run from the browser-based Web Reports interface. Schedule a saved comparison to be run on a recurring basis. Comparison alerts result from differences detected during scheduled comparisons.

When Application Configuration Console detects differences, you have the capability to synchronize changes by either writing out the changes made in Application Configuration Console (provision) or reloading the external files (update).