Chapter 4. Enterprise Monitoring

So far we have focused on building various components of cloud computing using Oracle Enterprise Manager. Like any robust system, modern cloud environments are expected to be resilient. Exceptional software engineering and system administration efforts go into making an enterprise cloud environment safe and failure proof.

However, the reality is that things will break eventually. The question is not how we can prevent failures, but how fast we can recover from failures. Cloud computing poses formidable challenges when it comes to maintaining uptime and ensuring that failures don't impact the SLAs.

Monitoring for failures or exceptional conditions is part of cloud philosophy but as the scale of the cloud grows, it gets inefficient to manually monitor the entire cloud infrastructure. Imagine a cloud environment at the scale of Amazon AWS; it would be unpractical and almost impossible to manually monitor such a cloud infrastructure. For this reason, all the scalable...