Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 11g R1: Business Service Management: A Hands-on guide to modeling and managing business services using Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g R1 using this Oracle book and eBook

OEM is a software offered by Oracle that provides a single unified platform for modeling and managing enterprise data centers. Although targeted primarily towards managing the Oracle suite of products within an enterprise, it also has built-in capabilities to model and manage a limited set of widely adopted non-Oracle software products. It provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for the entire Oracle Grid within the enterprise. It covers all aspects of the Oracle stack starting from the physical host management to database management. It also includes management for Oracle middleware components and the applications running on it. As discussed in the previous chapter, the mindset of IT executives has shifted more towards business enablement using IT infrastructure rather than just IT operations management. However, the shift in focus does not mean that IT operations can be ignored. In fact, companies are now keen to understand the impact...

As seen in the earlier section, the OEM product provides features to manage and monitor the IT infrastructure within an enterprise. These features enable the users to perform configuration changes and also monitor the installed products. These installed products need to support the various business functions of the enterprise. It is therefore a reasonable assumption that these products are very complex in nature and need detailed support utilities and console applications to allow administrators to configure and manage them. To elaborate further with an example, let's consider the case of an Oracle database installation. The database might be installed in a cluster to provide high availability and failover support. The database product by reason of having evolved over a couple of decades will expose many different installation and subsequent configuration options. In fact, the configuration of a database is very specific to the business function that...

As seen in Chapter 1 and in the earlier sections of this chapter, there are great demands on the functionality of an enterprise-wide infrastructure management solution. Not only should the centralized solution be capable of managing tens of thousands of physical entities spread across the landscape that forms the infrastructure, but it also must have the capability to model, monitor, administer, and configure higher-level logical entities that map to business functions. Apart from these, it must also be able to perform complex computations that assess the impact of the various targets on the business functions. Another often ignored demand on the management solution is to take into consideration the geographical spread of the infrastructure landscape. This spread means that data needs to be collected across geographies with differing time zones. Business service models that take into account targets spread across geographies must consider data normalization...

Any enterprise IT infrastructure contains numerous disparate components that are geographically distributed across various data centers. These components include both hardware components such as servers hosting different applications, network switches, routers, storage devices, and so on, as well as software components such as operating systems, database servers, application servers, middleware components, packaged applications, distributed applications, and so on. Although these components exhibit various management traits and expose multiple management operations, they also have certain common attributes that need to be monitored by the IT administrators. For instance, the performance characteristics of an Oracle database instance are completely different from those of an Oracle WebLogic managed server. However, both these components still exhibit a common trait of indicating their health or current state. This indicates if the corresponding component functions are available...

As discussed in Chapter 1, different perspectives are required to have a holistic view of the enterprise IT infrastructure. These perspectives are known as composite targets and are created by relating individual target models. These include different models such as groups and system targets as well as service targets. Groups and system targets provide the mapping between the business goals and the underlying IT infrastructure. The service targets help in visualizing and monitoring the availability, performance, and service-levels of various business functions provided within an enterprise. While group targets are homogeneous collections of targets that are logically related, system targets are heterogeneous in nature. OEM 11g provides support for all these modeling paradigms. As is evident, such composite modeling paradigms are applicable only in a wider context within an enterprise. These models are not meant to be applied at an individual target level.

To elaborate further...

The previous sections introduced the concepts of OEM. We looked at managing individual entities of the IT infrastructure. However, OEM also provides out-of-the-box solutions for managing some of the key products and focus areas. These management solutions focus on certain products and provide models for managing the base targets, and the management of the business functions provided by these products. These models are built into the Grid Control product and come into effect post discovery of the corresponding product suite. Let's look at the list of key products and areas that are the focus of management in OEM 11gR1.

The following image illustrates the various focus areas in OEM Grid Control 11gR1:

The support for these focus areas are provided out-of-the-box with OEM Grid Control 11gR1. However, these options are licensed individually and are sold as OEM management packs. As an example, let's consider the Applications Management Product Focus...

In this chapter, we introduced the OEM product family as a tool that is a pre-requisite to effectively monitor and manage the IT infrastructure grid within the enterprise. This was followed by a brief overview of the Database Control, Fusion Middleware Control, and Grid Control flavors of the OEM. We saw that Grid Control is a step above the other two flavors and provides the wider enterprise view on a single canvas. We also covered the high level architecture and the main components of the OEM Grid Control.

This chapter also covered key terminologies relevant in the context of OEM Grid Control such as target models, availability, performance metrics, and alerts. We then moved to the composite target models that are supported exclusively by the Grid Control flavor of OEM. This chapter also provided a brief overview of various composite targets such as groups, systems, and service targets. We also saw the active and passive modeling capabilities within the service targets. A subsequent...