1 New Features In Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1

Database Management

Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1 now supports the new features available in Oracle Database 11g Release 2. The new database management features in this release are discussed below.

Middleware Management

Enhanced Interface for Managing Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

Beginning with Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1, the interface used to manage Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is richer and easier to use. For instance, a navigation tree on the left-hand side of the page controls details displayed on the right. In addition, context sensitive menus provide easy access to commonly used operations and features. In-context drill down support into the Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control and Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console management interfaces is also provided.

Management and Monitoring of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Components

Enterprise Manager Grid Control now supports the discovery, monitoring and central management of the entire family of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g components. These new features streamline your ability to manage all Fusion Middleware targets directly from within Enterprise Manager Grid Control, without having to switch between Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Fusion Middleware Control and the WebLogic Server Administration Console user interfaces.

Supported targets include:

• Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle SOA Suite

• Oracle HTTP Server

• Oracle Web Cache

• Oracle Identity Management

• Metadata Services repositories

• Oracle WebCenter

• Oracle Portal

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer

• Oracle Forms Services

• Oracle Reports

• User Messaging Service

• Applications built using the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF)

Customizable Performance Summaries for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1 now offers customizable performance summary pages for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g components. You can modify the default settings for the new Performance Summary pages by:

• Choosing the performance metric charts to be displayed

• Arranging the order of charts

• Specifying the time range from which to display performance data

• Displaying performance data from multiple components in a single chart

• Displaying prior performance data alongside current performance data

• Saving a set of customizations made to the performance summary pages as a named chart set that can be accessed in the future.

The new performance summary pages allow you to resolve performance problems more quickly, perform trend analysis more easily, and correlate performance data across metrics more efficiently.

Support Workbench Support for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

The Support Workbench, a tool for investigating and reporting problems in your Fusion Middleware environment, has been extended to support Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. The Support Workbench allows you to gather first-failure diagnostic data, obtain a support request number, and upload diagnostic data to Oracle Support with minimal effort in a short amount of time.

WebLogic Server Discovery and Management Features

New features have been introduced to improve the user experience by adding the WebLogic Server and other Oracle Fusion Middleware targets to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1.

• Add WebLogic Server Domains to Grid Control Via the EMCLI Utility

  Adding one or more WebLogic Server Domains to Grid Control through the Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EMCLI) is now supported.

• Continuous Rediscovery of WebLogic Server Domains

  The process for refreshing WebLogic Server Domains has been automated, ensuring that the WebLogic Server Domain being monitored is always accurately represented in the Grid Control Console.

• Improved User Experience for Adding WebLogic Server Domains to Grid Control

  The process of adding WebLogic Server Domains to Enterprise Manager Grid Control for central management and monitoring has been further automated, thereby improving productivity and reducing management costs. When adding a WebLogic Server Domain using a remote Management Agent, you are no longer required to manually copy the WebLogic jar files to the remote Management Agent machine.

• Monitor WebLogic Server Domains During Administration Server Downtime

  Enterprise Manager Grid Control no longer requires the WebLogic Administration Server to be up in order to monitor and manage a WebLogic Server Domain and its contents. You can ensure continuous monitoring and management of a WebLogic Server Domain and its contents – even during Administration Server maintenance periods.

• Monitor Each Managed Server Independently Within Domain

  When adding a WebLogic Server Domain to Enterprise Manager Grid Control, you can now choose which Management Agent should be used to monitor each Managed Server within the domain. For example, selecting an Agent that is local to the machine where the Managed Server is installed provides the ability to correlate WebLogic Server performance and configuration data with its underlying hardware and operating system performance and configuration data. It also provides the ability to provision Oracle Fusion Middleware.

• Extend Monitoring for Applications Deployed to WebLogic Server

  Beginning with Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1, you can add performance metrics beyond those available out-of-box for JMX-instrumented applications deployed on Oracle WebLogic Server. Businesses can now consolidate the monitoring of all JMX-enabled applications deployed to WebLogic Server into a single management tool – Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

• WebLogic Server Installation and Patch Version Tracking

  Enterprise Manager now tracks installation-related information for Oracle WebLogic Server. You can easily track the number of WebLogic Server installations present across the datacenter, the associated versions and installation locations, and also identify the patches that have been applied.

• Enhanced Configuration Collection for WebLogic Servers

  Additional configuration items including settings for resource adapters, web services, node managers, and machines will be collected as part of Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control's daily collection of WebLogic Managed Server configuration data. Businesses can get a more comprehensive view of their WebLogic Server configurations. Consequently, tracking, analyzing, comparing, and searching across configurations is more complete.

• New Target Types for Application and Clustered Application Deployments:

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1 introduces new target types for Application Deployment and Clustered Application Deployment. Having specific target types for deployed Java EE applications enhances the application monitoring experience by enabling process control, thresholds, alert notifications, and target privileges for those deployed Java EE applications.

• Creating WebLogic Domain Groups

  Monitoring several Oracle WebLogic Domains is simplified by allowing the creation of a new custom group target that represents the entire domain. This custom WebLogic Domain Group target type enables you to gain an overview of the availability, performance, configuration, and potential problem areas across the domains. You can access such health information from just a few pages rather than having to navigate to each domain's pages individually.

WebCenter Suite Monitoring

Enterprise Manager Grid Control now provides application performance management for both Oracle WebCenter and Oracle WebLogic Portal with the following capabilities:

• Automatic discovery of critical components such as ADF Task Flows, Portal Desktops, Portlets, and JSF pages as well as their underlying dependencies

• Contextual drill-down provides visibility into performance bottlenecks within WebCenter and WebLogic Portal environments providing the critical metrics necessary to quickly pinpoint problems across applications both horizontally across those containers and vertically through the application stack all the way down to the database

• Change detection ensures the underlying model that identifies the dependencies and relationships between components is always up-to-date.

Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite Monitoring

Management of Fusion Middleware 11g Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) composites and infrastructure has been enhanced to provide monitoring, fault management, configuration management, SLM, and deployment.

• SOA Composite Instance Tracing based on sensor value across multiple domains.

• Service, reference, and component metrics across BPEL, Mediator, Domain Services, and Human Workflow engines.

• Drill down to activity level metrics for BPEL components.

• Error monitoring and reporting for both business and technical faults in instance execution.

• Internal dependency views of wiring between components.

SOA Artifact Cloning Support

A number of new deployment procedures that automate the provisioning of SOA artifacts are provided.

• Provisioning of SOA Composites

  Enables you to provision a new SOA composite or to provision a new version of an existing SOA composite to one or more WebLogic Domains.

• Automated Cloning of SOA Artifacts

  Enables easy cloning of SOA artifacts from a reference installation or gold image stored in the Software Library to an existing WebLogic Server Domain. SOA artifacts to be cloned include SOA composites, Web service policies, and Java Platform Security (JPS) configuration.

• Automated Deployment of SOA Composites

  Automating cloning of SOA domains enables you to provision new SOA domains by cloning an existing SOA domain including the underlying WebLogic Server infrastructure.

Web Services Management and Policy Features

Web services management features of Fusion Middleware are now available through Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

Web service test functionality is supported, including the ability to test REST-style Web service endpoints.

• A new domain-level dashboard listing most commonly used policies, with elaborate policy violation metrics, is provided.

• New features for core SOA Governance are available, enabling you to monitor and govern the critical Web services from one central console.

• You can browse and import services registered in WSIL or UDDI registries.

• Monitoring capabilities have been enhanced to support historical data and trending. You can also set and view alerts to critical metrics.

New Oracle Identity and Access Management Functionality

The former Identity Management plug-in has been included in the base installation of Enterprise Manager Grid Control. This eliminates the need to install a separate plug-in for monitoring Oracle Identity Management Suite 10g (including OID, DAS, DIP, and SSO) and simplifies the deployment procedure for customers.

Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides management capabilities for Oracle Identity Management 11g components (including Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Virtual Directory, Directory Integration Platform, and Oracle Identity Federation) with the following capabilities:

• Single-step discovery for both Oracle Identity Management 10g and Oracle Identity Management 11g components allowing you to quickly set up your monitoring environment.

• Identity and Access page that provides a central location for discovering Identity Management components, creating systems and services, and monitoring the entire Identity Management environment.

• Provides a wide range of out-of-box performance metrics like CPU utilization, failed and successful authentications or authorizations, average response time, provisioning metrics, server and component status. These metrics help identify the root causes of problems that slow down performance, extend response times, or create outages.

  • Customizable performance summaries with a Metric Palette that allows users to drag and drop performance charts.

  • Drill down into usage and performance statistics for:

    • Oracle Identity Federation Providers that show authentication requests and responses, HTTP and SOAP requests and responses, and authentication response processing time.

    • Oracle Internet Directory User Statistics that show failed and completed LDAP operations like Add, Bind, Compare, Delete, Modify, and Search.

    • Directory Integration Platform Synchronization and Provisioning Profiles that show job status, successful, skipped, or failed changes, completion time, and errors.

• Perform key configuration management tasks like keeping track of configuration changes for diagnostic and regulatory purposes, taking snapshots to store configurations, and comparing component configurations to ensure consistency of configurations within the same or across different environments.

• Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides a new wizard for creating Identity and Access Systems. The wizard automatically groups targets by their installations and allows the administrators to further add or remove components while creating the system.

My Oracle Support Integration

Seamless Access To My Oracle Support

Full integration with My Oracle Support (formerly Oracle MetaLink) is now provided, further enhancing Enterprise Manager Grid Control's ability to serve as a single interface for managing and supporting the enterprise. You now have seamless access to My Oracle Support console pages for managing Service Requests, deploying patches and reviewing Knowledge Base articles, all without leaving the Enterprise Manager Grid Control user interface.

The My Oracle Support console is personalized based on your login, so that you will see patch recommendations relevant to your environment. You can even view user-provided ratings and comments for specific patches.

Lifecycle Management and Provisioning

Patching Support for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Product Suite

This feature supports orchestrated patching of physical standby and Oracle Data Guard environments, enabling rolling patching of your data recovery environments in a single automated flow with zero downtime. This feature supports orchestrated patching of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 targets.

Oracle Database Machine Provisioning

Automated deployment and configuration of Real Application Clusters (RAC) version 11.2 on the Sun Oracle Database Machine is now supported. By using Enterprise Manager-based deployment procedures, this feature greatly simplifies RAC deployment and configuration by requiring a minimum of inputs.

Real Application Cluster Provisioning to Support Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2)

This feature enables provisioning of the Real Application Clusters stack on database clusters. It complements the existing provisioning applications which enable provisioning of Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Database 11g Release 1 RAC stacks on cluster machines.

The RAC Provisioning Applications of Enterprise Manager provide a unified approach to install, scale-up and scale-down the Real Application Clusters (RAC) stack on a set of cluster machines.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Grid Infrastructure is a new entity that is built on Oracle Clusterware (CRS) and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). The version 11.2 release includes a number of changes from the earlier release. The following changes are relevant to RAC provisioning in Enterprise Manager:

• The Database 11.2 Clusterware Oracle Home can be configured for both the cluster services and the ASM services.

• Cluster configuration files like Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Voting Disk can now be stored on ASM.

• The database listener will always be brought up from the Clusterware home.

• The cluster installation no longer requires the private hostnames and private IP addresses of a host.

• Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS) is a new multi-platform, scalable file system, and storage management technology that extends Automatic Storage Management (ASM).

• New cluster configuration options have been added which take in new parameters.

Single Instance Database Provisioning to Support Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2)

Downloadable, dynamic prerequisite checks ensure you are fully prepared for database deployment. This feature also includes new deployment procedures to provision version 11.2 Oracle Restart (Single Instance High Availability) and Grid Infrastructure with Automated Storage Management (ASM) and enhancements to existing deployment procedures to support Oracle Database version 11g Release 2 (11.2).

Application Performance Management

JVM Diagnostics Integrated Into Enterprise Manager Grid Control

The new JVM Diagnostics feature combines previous features from Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) with additional deep metrics and direct context from WebLogic Server and Domain pages as well as from Application Dependency and Performance and Request Monitoring. With this new feature, Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) are represented as targets within Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Release 1. Additionally, this feature allows access to metrics from a centralized starting point and provides additional integration points with the AD4J user interface.

Application Dependency and Performance Integrated Into Enterprise Manager Grid Control

This feature provides an integrated solution that allows a coherent and unified view of managed applications. Features from the formerly stand-alone Composite Application Monitor and Modeler (CAMM) are now integrated into Enterprise Manager Grid Control. This allows access to deeper-dive metrics and contextual views (topology, functional views, architectural views) from a centralized starting point and easier access to Application Dependency and Performance features.

Request Monitoring for Java EE Applications

The Request Monitoring feature provides end-to-end visibility into requests for Java applications deployed to WebLogic Server. It establishes a clear view of a request flowing through a multi-tier java environment.

• Real time visibility into business request volumes and critical system components, enabling a specific bottleneck within the overall request which may span multiple containers to be identified

• Highly flexible request tracing across multi-tier infrastructures provides deep details when threshold violations occur

• Request analysis identifies bottlenecks within actual request topology and provides comparisons between business transactions

Server Management

Support for Oracle Virtualization Management Release 2.2

This feature provides more flexibility in using third-party storage providers and networks infrastructures, including the following:

• A virtualized environment with minimal down time and impact during the server maintenance phase

• The capability to migrate your existing physical servers to a virtualized environment (P2V)

• The capability to migrate the VMWare Virtual Machines to Oracle VM (V2V)

• Using resource constraint features over CPU and Disk I/O resources for proper resource utilization and management in the data center

• Enabling of the Quality of Service (QoS) feature for the virtual disks (shared and additional) and specifying the priority for disk I/O operations for the virtual machine

• Better error status handling

• Creation of hardware virtualized templates from existing physical machines

• Conversion of VMware virtual machines to templates

Enterprise Manager Grid Control Framework

Enhanced High Availability Support

Several enhancements have been made to facilitate high availability configuration of Enterprise Manager Grid Control:

• Simplified process for adding additional Oracle Management Service (OMS) instances to your environment via a single configuration tool (OMSCA)

• Ability to update the configuration properties for an OMS instance, such as debug level, without stopping and re-starting the instance

• Simplified software load balancer configuration, eliminating the need for such tasks as hand editing of Oracle HTTP Server configuration files

Extended Audit Operations

To further support regulatory compliance, auditing capabilities have now been extended to include the following operations in Enterprise Manager Grid Control:

• Changes to monitoring settings for a specific target

• Creation, modification, and deletion of monitoring templates

• Login/logout to database target events

• Database startup/shutdown events

Support For Converting Non-privilege-Propagating Groups To Privilege-Propagating Groups

Privilege-propagating groups facilitate the management of privileges across members of the group. An existing group can now be converted to a privilege-propagating group using the modify_group EMCLI verb.

Enhanced Security For Enterprise Manager Grid Control Communications

Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1 support for communications among Enterprise Manager Grid Control components will more tightly protect transferred data against "man-in-the-middle attacks". This enhancement will also better enable you to comply with strict security compliance standards, if required.