4 Managing Groups

The Enterprise Manager Grid Control group management system lets you combine targets into logical sets, called groups. This enables you to organize, manage, and effectively monitor the potentially large number of targets in your enterprise.

This chapter covers the group management system in the following sections:

• Types of Groups

• The Group Home Page

4.1 Types of Groups

Enterprise Manager groups can include:

• Targets of the same type, such as:

  • All hosts in your data center

  • All of your production databases

• Targets of different types, such as:

  • The database, application server, listener, and host that are used in your application environment

  • Targets operating within a particular data center region

A redundancy group is a group that contains members of the same type that function collectively as a unit. It functions like a single logical target that supports a status (availability) metric. A redundancy group is considered up (available) if at least one of the member targets is up. Redundancy groups support all group management features. Do not use redundancy groups if the group you want to model is a Real Application, a Clusters database, a host cluster, an HTTP server high-availability group, or an OC4J high availability group. Instead, you can use the following specialized target types for this purpose: a cluster, a cluster database, an HTTP HA group or an OC4J HA group.

A system is another special type of group. For more information, see "System Management".

4.1.1 Scenario: Types of Groups

Linda has many different groups that her team manages. One of these groups contains an entire test application stack and a group of production databases. Linda further needs to break them into logical groups to simplify management and set up administrative tasks for both the groups.

4.1.2 Defining a Group

This topic describes the procedure that Linda can follow to define the groups relating to the environments she needs to manage.

To define a group:

1. From the Targets page, select the Groups subtab.

2. Click Add.

   The Create Group wizard appears. You create a group by specifying a name and a time zone for it first and then specifying target members, the charts that you want displayed, the columns of data and the format in which it will be displayed on the dashboard.
   

3. Click OK.

   The Groups page appears. The list of groups includes the group you just created. You can click the name of the group to bring up its home page. You can see the dashboard of the group by clicking Launch Dashboard.

   
   

   Linda can similarly create groups for all the environments she needs to work on.

4.2 The Group Home Page

The Group home page is the central location for monitoring group information. You can use the Group home page to see an Availability pie chart that depicts the current status of all members so that you can easily assess the percentages of available and unavailable members. You can quickly drill down for information if any member target is down. You can get a list of open alerts and policy violations, categorized by severity and recency, so you can quickly focus on the most critical problems first. You can see summaries of recent configuration changes across all members in the group and of Critical Patch Advisories for Oracle homes within the group.You can also use this page to access the Policy Trend Overview page, which provides a comprehensive view of the group for compliance with policy rules over a period of time. Using policy charts, you can assess trends in policy violations. This page also leads to the Security at a Glance page, which provides an overview of the security of the group and shows statistics about security policy violations and critical security patches that have not been applied.

4.2.1 Scenario: The Group Home Page

Linda needs to be able to assess the health of different groups with quick access to Grid Control functionality around these targets. She can do this by using the Group home page, where she can see a combined picture of the availability of various members in a group, how they are performing, the trends of policy violations, recent configuration changes and so on.

4.2.2 Administering Groups

Linda wants to set up jobs to be executed on all or some members of a group. This topic describes how she can do this from the Group home page.

To set up a job for a group:

1. Click the name of the group from the Groups page.

   The home page of the selected group appears. It shows a summary of how the various members in the group are performing. The Charts page shows charts for the group as configured while defining the group. The Administration subtab helps you set up and execute various administrative tasks on the group. The Members page lets you see the members of the group and also modify the membership.

2. Click the Administration subtab.

   You can use the Administration page to create and view the status of jobs and blackouts, to view a summary of deployed components, and so on.

3. Select a job type from the Create Job list and click Go.

   This brings up the Create Job wizard, which you can use to specify a job to be applied on the members of a specified target type within the selected group.
   

4. Click Parameters.

   You can specify parameters, if applicable, to the job. For an OS Command job, you can specify either a single command or an OS script as a parameter. By default, '/bin/sh' is used for UNIX systems and 'cmd' for Windows environments. You can specify an interpreter for scripts that use another executable, such as Perl.

5. Click Credentials if you want to specify separate credentials for the job.

   See the section "Preferred Credentials".

6. Click Schedule if you want the job to be executed at a specified time and not immediately.

7. Click Access to specify the roles or administrators who can access the job.

8. Click Submit to finish creating the job.

   Alternatively, if you would like to save the job and not submit it for execution, click Save to Library.

   Linda can similarly create other jobs for members of specific target types in various groups of the environment she manages.

   For more information on jobs, see Chapter 6, "Job System".

4.3 Managing Groups: Oracle By Example Series

Oracle By Example (OBE) has a series on the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Quick Start Guide.

The Groups OBE covers the tasks in this chapter with annotated screen shots. It is located at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe10gEMR2/Quick_Start/groups/groups.htm