2 Overview of Enterprise Manager Grid Control

This chapter provides an overview of Enterprise Manager Grid Control (Grid Control) and helps you understand its architecture and the various core components that are integrated within the product.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Grid Control Overview

• Grid Control Architecture

Grid Control Overview

Grid Control is a system management software that delivers centralized monitoring, administration, and life cycle management functionality for the complete Oracle IT infrastructure, including systems running Oracle and non-Oracle technologies. Your infrastructure may comprise multiple Oracle Databases, Oracle WebLogic Managed Servers, Web applications deployed on these servers, hosts running these targets, and so on. You can, of course, use the individual product consoles to monitor the status of each of these targets, but it becomes cumbersome to shuttle between multiple console windows and track the performance of each of these targets using so many windows.

Grid Control offers a single-window solution that allows you to monitor and manage the complete Oracle IT infrastructure from a single console. Grid Control also offers support for monitoring certain non-Oracle products, for example, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Juniper Networks NetScreen Firewall, and so on.

With a broad set of end-to-end monitoring, administration, configuration management, provisioning, and security capabilities, Grid Control reduces the cost and complexity of managing such grid computing environments. Robust service-level management functionality within Grid Control dramatically improves service levels through rich transaction and end-user performance monitoring and deep diagnostics for multi-tier Internet applications.

For more information about Grid Control, visit our Web site access the following URL:

http://www.oracle.com/enterprise_manager/index.html

Grid Control Architecture

Although Grid Control is viewed as a single entity, technically, it is built with the following software components:

• Oracle Management Service (OMS)

• Oracle Management Agent (Management Agent)

• Oracle Management Repository (Management Repository)

While OMS acts as the brain of the Grid Control architecture responsible for communicating with Management Agents and a central repository that stores information, Management Agent acts as the hands and legs of a body responsible for collecting information from the monitored targets and transporting them to OMS. And, Management Repository is the repository configured in Oracle Database to store the collected information.

The following illustrates the Grid Control architecture:

Figure 2-1 Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture

After installing Grid Control, what you see is the Grid Control Console, the user interface that displays information about the health of the monitored targets. However, internally, OMS orchestrates with Management Agents to discover targets, monitor and manage them, and store the collected information in a repository for future reference and analysis.

To summarize, Grid Control has the following core componets:

Table 2-1 Enterprise Manager Grid Control Components

Component	Definition
Oracle Management Agent (Management Agent)	Management Agent is an integral software component that is deployed on each monitored host. It is responsible for monitoring all the targets running on those hosts, communicating that information to the middle-tier Oracle Management Service, and managing and maintaining the hosts and its targets.
Oracle Management Service (OMS)	OMS is a J2EE Web application that orchestrates with Management Agents to discover targets, monitor and manage them, and store the collected information in a repository for future reference and analysis. OMS also renders the user interface for the Grid Control console. OMS is deployed to the application server that is installed along with other core components of Grid Control.
Oracle Management Repository (Management Repository)	Management Repository is the storage location where all the information collected by the Management Agent gets stored. It consists of objects such as database jobs, packages, procedures, views, and tablespaces. Technically, OMS uploads the monitoring data it receives from the Management Agents to the Management Repository. The Management Repository then organizes the data so that it can be retrieved by OMS and displayed in the Grid Control console. Since data is stored in the Management Repository, it can be shared between any number of administrators accessing Grid Control. Management Repository is configured in Oracle Database. This Oracle Database can either be an existing database in your environment or a new one installed along with other core components of Grid Control.
Grid Control Console	Grid Control Console is the user interface you see after you install Grid Control. From the Grid Control console, you can monitor and administer your entire computing environment from one location on the network. All the services within your enterprise, including hosts, databases, listeners, application servers, and so on, are easily managed from one central location.