This chapter provides an overview of the new features available in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.1. It lists new features specifically associated with the base Oracle Enterprise Manager platform which includes the Cloud Control console, Oracle Management Service, and Oracle Management Agents. The latest Plug-in and Connector releases are also highlighted.
This document contains the following sections:
See Also:
For detailed information about Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Documentation web site:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E63000_01/index.htm
The Enterprise Manager Framework and Infrastructure component can be divided into the following groupings:
The Enterprise Manager user interface (UI) has been refreshed to include a new and more modern color palette, cleaner icons, and larger font size with more spacing.
This enhancement provides a more tablet-friendly experience for users. Users will also experience faster page load times and enhanced visualization and graphics.
This feature provides a way for the super administrator to send a pop-up message to all users of Enterprise Manager. Users who are currently logged in to Enterprise Manager will receive a pop-up message from the super administrator. This message is sent using Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EM CLI) send_system_broadcast verb and can include various message severity levels. This is particularly useful in preventing a managed target from being taken off line without notice to other Enterprise Manager users.
This feature enhances the user's experience by providing a single interface for administrator communication within Enterprise Manager.
This feature enables an Enterprise Manager administrator to configure multiple proxy servers that can be used by the OMS for its communications to the Management Agents. Doing this provides redundancy for failures or maintenance. The addition of new proxies will not require OMS bounces. These proxies are managed as complete targets so that users can easily identify a proxy if it is down. Agents are associated with the proxies by name or pattern. Patterns are a way to specify the a list of Agents whose target names match the pattern. The OMS tries to use a proxy with an Agent only when there is a direct association present or a pattern match is successful. You can configure many-to-many associations between proxies and Agents. For example multiple proxies can be associated with single agent and vice-versa.
Configuring multiple proxies for communication from the OMS to an agent ensures there is no single point of failure.
Corrective actions are tasks that are used to automatically fix or further diagnose target availability events or metric alerts. In this release, they have been enhanced to support all event types including Compliance Standard Rule violations, Service Level Agreement (SLA) alerts, and job status events.
A corrective action can be configured to run automatically in response to an event or can be invoked manually by an administrator. A more controlled development lifecycle is now supported that enables administrators to first develop, test, then finally publish a corrective action for public use. When published, the corrective action can be associated with one or more events.
The extended scope of events for which corrective actions can be configured enables better administrator efficiency. Instead of manually responding to events, common responses to these events can be scripted and automated using corrective actions.
Events relating to the same issue can be automatically combined into one incident. For example, all target down events for instances of a cluster database or all target down events for targets within a WebLogic domain can be combined into one incident. Doing this enables administrators to manage all of these events as a single unit.
The criteria for grouping events include grouping by targets on the same host or by targets belonging to the same aggregate target (for example a cluster or system), grouping by event category, and grouping events by metric. A time window can also be used to group together events that occur within close time frames of each other. For example, the default one hour time window groups together events that occur within an hour of each other.
Event grouping reduces the overall volume of incidents created and promotes more efficient management of incidents. The extended scope of events for which corrective actions can be configured enables better administrator efficiency. Instead of manually responding to events, common responses to these events can be scripted and automated using corrective actions.
In Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c, a new job type has been added to support Chef recipes. The Enterprise Manager software library now supports managing and accessing both Chef cookbooks and recipes, and deployment procedures have been extended to support the execution of Chef recipes. Chef cookbooks and recipes can exist either in the software library or on the host on which they are being executed. This release supports chef-solo using the following steps:
Ensure that chef-solo has been setup and is available.
Create a software library folder.
Upload a Chef cookbook.
Create a job using the Chef job type and submit it.
Steps two and three are required only if Chef cookbooks are loaded in the software library.
Page performance diagnosis is enhanced to report SQL statements that are executed at repository which are increasing repository time for a poorly performing UI console page. With this feature, you have greater visibility into the SQL executions triggered within the page. The page performance diagnosis has also been enhanced to show the pages that have been performing poorly for the last 24 hours in addition to pages currently performing poorly.
The Enterprise Manager 13.1 Installer includes the following enhancements that simplify Enterprise Manager setup:
Integration of BI Publisher with the Enterprise Manager installer. BI Publisher is configured by default during Enterprise Manager installation. If you are upgrading to Enterprise Manager 13.1 and your existing installation includes BI Publisher, the existing BI Publisher will also be upgraded. If your existing installation does not include BI Publisher, then BI publisher must be installed post-upgrade.
JVM Diagnostics (JVMD) is now deployed and configured by default with the Oracle Fusion Middleware Plug-in as part of the installation process.
Enterprise Manager administrators spend a lot time on various agent life cycle operations starting from a fresh installation through upgrade and patching. These tasks are even more challenging if you manage over 100 agents, ensuring they are all on the same patch level. Gold image-based agent lifecycle management simplifies the agent lifecycle process by using images of a gold agent to:
Provide auto-recovery from agent upgrade and agent plug-in deployment or upgrade
Ensure zero downtime for agent maintenance including patching, upgrade, and plug-ins
Providing standardized agent configurations
Provision, upgrade, and update Agents and plug-ins in a highly scalable approach
Create from live test agent patched and updated with required plug-ins
Export/import the gold image (test agent) from Test to Enterprise Manager Production
Provide Oracle supplied gold agent image and configurations through Self Update
Report to show distribution of agents deployed with gold images
Pick configuration data from source agent emd.property file
The distributed software library delivers improved efficiency when transferring large images over a WAN to remote servers in geographically distant data centers. This feature introduces the concept of cache nodes, which can be used to stage select content on servers that are localized to a region or a subnet. All subsequent file transfers are initiated from these cache nodes, thereby reducing transfer time and required bandwidth.
The following sections describe new monitoring and incident management features and enhancements in the release.
Notification blackouts enable you to continue monitoring targets that are under maintenance. During the blackout period, alerts can be viewed in the Cloud Control console, but notifications and incident rules are suspended. From an SLA perspective, target downtime does not impact overall target availability (%).
Notification blackouts support target maintenance periods by suspending incidents and notifications for events while targets are undergoing planned maintenance activities. To give administrators visibility into the status and health of the targets, monitoring of the target continues but incidents and notifications are suspended and target downtime is excluded from target availability (%) calculations. When the notification blackout ends, incidents will be created and notifications will be sent for events that occurred during the blackout.
With better visibility into the status and health of the targets, administrators can ensure that maintenance work does not negatively impact the targets, and therefore be assured that the target is ready to be used by their users at the end of the maintenance period.
Always-on Monitoring provides continuous monitoring of target down and other critical alerts when the regular Enterprise Manager monitoring and notification services are unavailable during Enterprise Manager planned downtime. Email notifications can be configured to be sent when target down and other critical alerts are detected.
Always-on Monitoring ensures that monitoring of these applications and systems continues even while Enterprise Manager is under maintenance. This enables IT staff to meet their SLAs and provide high quality services that their businesses require.
Incident Manager now displays incident views in the new Incident Dashboard. The Incident Dashboard is designed to provide at-a-glance summaries of open incidents, highlighting key areas such as incidents of fatal severity, escalated incidents, and unassigned incidents. In addition, incident summary charts are also included, providing analysis and breakdown of incidents across various dimension organized by severity, category, ownership, resolution status, age, and so on.
The incident dashboard can be configured to auto-refresh at regular intervals, enabling administrators to keep up with the latest incident data. An administrator can also customize the incident dashboard by adding new charts that summarize incident data across other dimensions (for example, by event category and target type).
The Incident Dashboard enables quick analysis of problem areas and better focus on areas of need. A senior administrator can use it to review incident workload distribution among administrators in a team and make adjustments as needed.
Target monitoring continues to be enhanced with the following new features:
Ability to change the metric threshold comparison operator for alerts. Changing the metric threshold comparison operator enables administrators to adjust the semantics of the alert to better fit their needs.
User-defined business hours for adaptive thresholds. Customizing adaptive threshold business hours to match actual hours of a business enables more accurate metric threshold calculations.
Support for compute expressions in metric extensions. Compute expressions enable administrators to specify more complex numerical calculations for metric extensions.
Ability to define a metric extension for a single instance database or real application clusters (RAC) instance alone.
These enhancements collectively provide more flexibility and richer monitoring of targets to better meet business requirements.
Incident Rule Sets can now be exported from one Enterprise Manager site and imported into another. The exported rule set is stored as an XML file.It can be saved as a backup or imported into another Enterprise Manager site as a way to quickly replicate rule sets between sites. The exported rule set includes all entities such as users subscribed to the rules, email addresses of recipients, targets on which the rule set operates, and notification methods.When importing the rule set, if these entities exist in the destination Enterprise Manager site, then they are kept in the rule set, otherwise they are removed from the rule set.
This feature facilitates a commonly used test-to-production process by enabling administrators to easily copy well-tested rule sets from an Enterprise Manager test site into an Enterprise Manager production site. For global enterprises that maintain multiple Enterprise Manager sites across different geographies, it also promotes standardization of incident management processes across sites.
This release supports the Selenium based tests. This test enables recorded scripts created with the open source Selenium IDE recorder or custom scripts created using the TestNG framework to be uploaded to Enterprise Manager and pushed to its beacons for test execution. It includes the following features:
The Selenium test Java files can be stored in the Enterprise Manager software library so they can be reused for multiple services.
Reference files can be stored in the software library for functions that are called during the execution of Selenium scripts.
When uploading or storing the Selenium test script Enterprise Manager automatically discovers used post parameters and stores these in a separate file that can easily be edited.
During the execution of the Selenium scripts, Enterprise Manager launches a full web browser session and captures all request/response sequences. The performance details are recorded in a test log file (only supported for Selenium test type).
You can drill-down directly from the test log file into Java workbench pages and WebLogic server log viewer using Execution Context ID (ECID) correlation.
You have direct access to test Log files from the Events and Incident page through the guided resolution path.
The new End User Service (EUS) target type displays end user performance and behavior information captured by Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). By discovering a RUEI system in Enterprise Manager, all applications, suites, and services that the RUEI system is monitoring automatically become individual EUS targets. All key performance indicator (KPI) events also automatically show up under the relevant EUS target. The EUS target type includes the following features:
Thematic map region. This shows a number of metrics on an interactive map that can be zoomed from continent to city, displaying end user metrics such as sessions, page views, and Application Performance Index (Apdex) scores.
User Flow region.
KPI region.
Top Users region.
Top Executed Pages region.
Sunburst region displaying end user violation percentages.
User Flow Details page.
End User Metrics page.
End User Sessions page.
Event and incidents guided resolution and diagnostics.
Integration with Java workbench page and WebLogic Server using ECID correlation.
Ability to create direct relationships to systems from EUS.
Support for business application targets to aggregate multiple EUS targets into a single service.
The corrective actions feature has been enhanced to include:
Support for all event types.
Support for compliance rules. This will allow users to associate corrective actions with various compliance checks.
Automated invocation using event rules.
Ability to attach the latest corrective actions automatically.
This section describes new features and enhancements for database management.
Flexible Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Database Machine Target Upgrade
Enterprise Manager Support for Intercontinental Zero Data Loss
Oracle Enterprise Manager support for Database Service Target
Enhanced Enterprise Manager Support for Optimizer Statistics Management
Enhanced Resource Manager Support for Database Resource Manager
When you upgrade from Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to 13c, you can choose to have existing Oracle Exadata Database Machine (DBM) targets continue to be monitored as EM 12c target types. When you are ready to adopt Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c monitoring features you can click a button in the Enterprise Manager user interface (UI) to convert the Enterprise Manager 12c DBM targets to Enterprise Manager DBM 13c targets.
This feature enables you to continue to monitor and manage DBM targets as you have with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c while at the same time upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c where you can experience new features in a phased manner at your convenience. The ability improves DBM manageability and quality of service.
Oracle Exadata DBMs newly discovered in Enterprise Manager 13c will be monitored using Enterprise Manager 13c target type functionality. Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c has also been enhanced to show a photo realistic view of the DBM hardware on the DBM Home page. The view represents the slots and whole machine with photo realistic background images of front and back of the Exadata hardware.
A primary database using Data Guard Maximum Availability can have redo transport configured for synchronous transmission to a light-weight Oracle instance, termed a Far Sync Standby. A Far Sync Standby has no data files. It's only function is to receive redo and forward it to one or more remote destinations. Remote destinations may be either Data Guard standby databases or Oracle Recovery Server. Oracle advanced compression can also be used by the Far Sync Standby to compress redo that it forwards to remote destinations. The existence of a Far Sync Standby is transparent to the user in so far as effecting Data Guard role transitions. The same switchover/failover commands used for any Data Guard configuration will transition any of the remote standby databases served by the Far Sync Standby to the primary production role. Enterprise Manager supports the creation and management of Far Sync Standbys.
Zero data loss protection can be achieved across long distances. The Far Sync Standby is located within a distance of the primary database where synchronous transport does not impact application performance. The Far Sync standby handles all communication with the remote standby and is transparent when executing a zero data loss failover. A Far Sync Standby also off loads the production database of the overhead of servicing multiple remote destinations (multiple standby databases or standby databases and Oracle Recovery Server). A Far Sync Standby also off loads the production database of the overhead of Redo Transport Compression
Database Consolidation Workbench is a comprehensive end-to-end solution for managing database consolidation. Database Consolidation Workbench has three phases (planning, migration, and validation) that help in end-to-end consolidation of databases. It provides a risk-free and accurate approach to consolidation by eliminating guess work and human errors.
The Database Consolidation Workbench planning phase uses historical workload metrics - both database and host - to produce an optimal consolidation plan that maps many sources of databases to fewer databases (both non-container database (CDB) and CDB) or servers on existing or yet to be procured hardware.The Database Consolidation Workbench migration phase automates the entire database consolidation implementation process, saving DBAs the manual error-prone effort of consolidation. The different modes of consolidation supported in the Database Consolidation Workbench enable IT administrators and DBAs to implement the chosen consolidation strategy with minimal downtime based on the business needs.The Database Consolidation Workbench validation phase uses SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) to validate the SQL workload performance on the consolidation platform to meet SLAs and identify any potential regressions so they can be tuned before production deployment.
Database consolidation validation using SQL Performance Analyzer enables DBAs to validate the optimal consolidation plan proposed by the Database Consolidation Workbench. The validation process validates source workloads (saved as SQL Tuning Sets). This is done by conducting SQL workload trials using SQL Performance Analyzer on the source databases and consolidated platform to identify SQL improvements or regressions and understand the net impact on the SQL workload because of the consolidation of databases. The validation process enables the DBA to quantify the I/O bandwidth savings by consolidating existing workloads onto Exadata Database Machine using the Exadata simulation component of SQL Performance Analyzer
By validating database consolidation, the DBA can avoid downtime or performance degradation caused by database consolidation by proactively identifying SQL regressions as a result of the consolidation of databases. In addition, database consolidation validation improves cost efficiencies for Exadata systems by accurately estimating the I/O savings, thereby enabling consolidation of more databases on the same Exadata system.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c supports the ability to monitor and manage an Oracle database service as an Enterprise Manager target. Users can manually or auto-discover database services as Enterprise Manager targets and search them by global target properties or associated database target names. The Database Service Target Home Page displays information about database associations, service resource utilization and, metric history.
This feature makes it easier for an administrator to monitor and manage database services.
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides Optimizer Statistics Manager, a central hub for all optimizer statistics related operations such as configuring preferences, overall database statistics status (stale, fresh, statistics), auto task statistics jobs, and submitted job progress and their status.It provides detailed information that helps clarify the results of statistics gathering tasks that can be used by an administrator to take appropriate action.
The Optimizer Statistics Manager enables database administrators to ensure that their database statistics are properly maintained, allow the database optimizer to produce the most efficient SQL execution plans and therefore the most efficiently operating database.
SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) enables you to assess system changes that impact SQL performance. There are a number of parameters that you can change to modify the behavior of SPA to customize testing for your environment. The new SPA Default Parameters page enables you to easily modify the default parameters for more effective testing and advanced reporting. It enables you to run additional, more comprehensive SPA tests enabling you to fully exploit all the features available in SQL Performance Analyzer and optimize the performance of your workloads.
Enterprise Manager facilitates running and managing Database Replay. New EM CLI verbs enable you to discover and import workloads that have been created outside of Enterprise Manager and initiate replays. These new EMCLI verbs enable you to integrate Database Replay command line execution with Enterprise Manager to fully exploit the capabilities of Database Replay.
Database Resource Manager (DBRM) improves quality of service by enabling administrators to specify how CPU utilization is distributed based on service levels and other workload attributes. Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c provides an enhanced graphical interface for DBRM monitoring and statistics. On the SQL Monitoring page, you can view long running queries and cancel them if required. On the Resource Manager Statistics page you can view parallel statements and servers that are active and queued by resource consumer groups. Historical information about runaway query management by resource consumer groups is also displayed.
Oracle Enterprise Manager enhanced support for DBRM makes it easier for DBAs to manage runaway queries to improve their business quality of service.
In-memory columnar storage functionality has been added that enables segments to be stored in the SGA memory area, in addition to the on-disk version, enabling faster look-up queries, scans, and joins. The In-memory Object Access Heatmap now shows the top 100 objects in-memory with their relative sizes, and shows you the recently accessed objects represented by different colors. The in-memory functionality also now allows searches for highly accessed objects not in-memory.The new database in-memory functionality enables data to be maintained in both the existing Oracle row format, for OLTP operations, and a new, purely in-memory column format, optimized for analytical processing. You can use the new In-memory Advisor to help you determine the most efficient deployment of the database in-memory functionality.
Enterprise Manager 13.1 introduces flexible DB access control for Enterprise Manager Database Plug-in. The new out of box roles align with database personas and provide tighter access control on managed target databases. Before the introduction of this feature an Enterprise Manager user granted access on the database had access to all of the database management features, such as performance management, high availability management, storage management, security management and so forth. Enterprises have different classes of users such as DBA, Application Developer, Application DBA, and Infrastructure DBA that need to access database management functions. There is a need for a flexible privilege model to accommodate these roles. For example, enterprises may want their application developers to access only performance management functions in a View Only mode.
Providing enterprise users access to unnecessary features and pages opens up the database to security vulnerabilities. Oracle recommends that you grant Enterprise Manager users the minimum number of privileges required to perform their job. Introducing these out of box database management roles grants users access to only the Enterprise Manager pages required to perform their job.
Fine grained privilege control for Enterprise Manager Database plug-in provides a privilege control model for database pages. This enables Enterprise Manager super administrators to grant the minimum access to Enterprise Manager administrators and users required to complete their more specific responsibilities.
Out of the box support is provided for discovering, monitoring, and administration of TCPS enabled listeners. All databases created through the Admin provisioning flow or Cloud Self Service portal support SSL enabled connection strings by default.
As businesses look towards cloud solutions, secure user authentication is a key requirement of the product offering. Oracle's default authentication protocols O3LOGON and O5LOGON (introduced in Enterprise Manager 11g) have been revamped to enable user authentication using the TCPS protocol for Oracle Database Server instead of the not-so-secure TCP protocol.
Note:
Using secure authentication has no impact on normal database performance.This section describes new features and enhancements for the Fusion Middleware Plug-in:
Oracle Enterprise Manager Support Workbench Integration with Diagnostic Assistant
Oracle Enterprise Manager integration with Remote Diagnostic Agent
Beginning with this release, administrators are able to discover and centrally manage their WebLogic Server version 12.2.1 deployments. All existing management features continue to be supported with WebLogic Server version 12.2.1, including:
Performance monitoring and diagnostics
Configuration management
Administration and process control
Provisioning and cloning middleware and scaling up/out domain
Patching
In addition to theses features, the discovery of WebLogic Server 12.2.1 also introduces new target types to support WebLogic Server multi-tenancy. If multi-tenancy is used and partitions have been created in the domain, then Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c with Fusion Middleware Plug-in 13.1.1.0 will add domain partition and partition application deployment targets as members of the discovered domain.
The Target Management Best Practices feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has been greatly enhanced. As in prior releases, this feature continues to recommend next steps to perform after discovering and promoting a WebLogic domain as a managed target or at any other time. However, with release 13.1 Target Management Best Practices exposes a wider range of management features for Oracle Fusion Middleware management. These features include basic setup, monitoring and diagnostics, configuration and compliance management, administration, service level management, and provisioning and patching. Target Management Best Practices also provides direct links to access these features as well as links to view recorded demonstrations, documentation, and online help.
The enhancements made to Target Management Best Practices help administrators who may be unaware of all the features available from Cloud Control for middleware management, and assists them to access, enable, configure, and use certain features.
Exalytics patching is now automated. To patch Exalytics, navigate to the Exalytics system and select the Software Update option in the menu. After the patching is complete, configure Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) if required.
If the Exalytics has an OBIEE instance installed and it is discovered, that instance can also be patched from the same section.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Release 13.1 provides a compliance standard based directly on the Department of Defense Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for Oracle WebLogic Server. Administrators can directly leverage this standard to confirm that their Oracle WebLogic Servers conform to this standard.
Many federal and local government agencies as well as private sector businesses follow the Department of Defense STIG standard for Oracle WebLogic Server to ensure the security of their application servers. This standard automates the initial and ongoing validation of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control managed Oracle WebLogic Servers to this standard.
With Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c, Support Workbench (SWB) can be used to collect diagnostics from non-Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) targets such as hosts, WebLogic servers, and Siebel applications. The Diagnostic Assistant (DA) is an Oracle support tool that provides a common, light-weight menu interface to multiple diagnostic collection tools such as ADR, RDA, and Explorer. The DA has been integrated with SWB. This integration enables users to execute different diagnostic collections of the DA directly from SWB. Additionally, SWB can now be used to schedule, execute, and collect diagnostics data for customized user scripts. After diagnostics data is collected, users can package it using the Incident Packaging Service (IPS) feature and create draft service requests (SRs).
The integration of Oracle Enterprise Manager and the DA makes it easier for customers to create draft SRs with required diagnostic data all from the Enterprise Manager interface thereby reducing problem resolution time.
Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) is a diagnostics collection tool used with a wide range of Oracle products and families including Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Starting with Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c, RDA can be executed from the Enterprise Manager interface and is packaged as part of the Enterprise Manager Agent foot print. Installing and deploying Enterprise Manager Agent makes RDA available for all supported targets and types. RDA has a quarterly release cycle and can be updated to newer versions through Oracle Enterprise Manager. Packaging directives can be used to archive the contents of the output directory into a single archive file for uploading RDA collected data to Oracle Support. Incident Packaging Service (IPS) can also request RDA collections at incident finalization time.
The integration of Oracle Enterprise Manager and RDA makes it easier for customers to upload diagnostic information to service requests through the Enterprise Manager interface and simplifies RDA life cycle management. This feature reduces problem resolution time for customers.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) management new features include:
Event Delivery Network (EDN) Diagnostics - Provides backlog and usage visibility into the EDN.
Service Bus Cluster Level Home Page - Collects and displays cluster-wide metrics, including a single view into server metrics across the cluster and a collection of cluster aggregated metrics for services.
Support for compliance rules. Enables users to associate corrective actions with various compliance checks.
Work Manager Groups - Shows the work managers related to the SOA Infrastructure and their mappings to SOA partitions where such a mapping exists.
Service Bus Heat Map - Heat maps of service bus services at the managed server and cluster level allow administrators to quickly pinpoint individual services that may be experience unusual performance or fault behavior.
During Oracle Fusion Middleware and WebLogic Domain discovery, Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c now discovers Node Manager targets associated with the domain. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c offers the following features for Node Manager:
Monitor Node Manager status and receive notification if down
In the context of Node Manager, view associated domains
In context of domain and WebLogic servers, view associated Node Managers and their status
View and analyze collected configuration data on Node Manager (for example, version, listen address, port)
Having a single interface for monitoring Oracle WebLogic and Node Manager targets simplifies an administrator's job and increases productivity.
Oracle WebLogic Server specific operations, which include WebLogic domain login, WebLogic domain logout, and WebLogic domain update/invoke, are now audited in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c. Enabling auditing of these operations enables an administrator to monitor, detect, and investigate problems and enforce enterprise-wide security policies.
Problem Analysis includes the following enhancements:
Configuration metrics correlation.
Log correlation.
Import/export of Problem Analysis metadata.
Problem Analysis metadata as a self updateable entity.
The Problem Analysis tool now analyzes historical performance metrics and related data for problem events and assigns ranks to the related targets metrics based on statistical correlation of historical data.
Two new views were added to the existing Related Metrics, Related Targets and Topology views: Related Config and Related Logs.
The Related Config view shows the list of configuration items that are related to the inspected metrics. The properties and change history are displayed for each configuration item. The related configuration items are predefined and available for some of the Fusion Middleware metrics.
The Related Log view presents a histogram of related WebLogic Server log messages over time, broken down by severity. It also list the message text, in the context of the time selected on the histogram.
This additional data, provided in the context of a specific metric, helps you find the root cause of a problem faster, by guiding you to the most relevant information collected by Enterprise Manager.
Using the Chart Sets menu in the list of related metrics in Problem Analysis, you can download chart set definitions to your desktop in XML format. This file can be imported into other instances of Enterprise Manager.
The chart set definition can be also updated using Enterprise Manager self update. Doing this enables you to get updates to the default chart sets as soon as they are updated by Oracle, without the need to upgrade Enterprise Manager or the Fusion Middleware Plug-in.
JVMD includes the following enhancements:
Java Workload Explorer (JWE) and Java Workload Reporter (JWR)
New UI page in JVMD enable you to quickly identify resource and workload bottlenecks.
JWE enables the you to create a data set by searching and filtering the different data elements (requests, SQL statements, methods, ECID, DBs, and so forth). The data set can be saved as a snapshot or as a metadata set. A snapshot set is a static set which contains actual data. A metadata set is a dynamic or temporal set which only contains the definition of the set. Using snapshot or metadata sets, you can compare activity between two sets of JVM between requests, or between two periods of time, for example before and after a new version is deployed.
At any time, you can generate a JWR from the active data set. A JWR is a flat page representation of all of the JVM activities as selected using the JWE filters and time selection capabilities. The JWR can be emailed and viewed outside of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, thereby facilitating easy communication with remote development centers, external experts, and so forth.
New Instrumentation
Enabled by on the fly, lightweight, byte code instrumentation, JVMD can now collect request execution times even when monitoring a non-Fusion Middleware domain (WebLogic or any other Java application server running without JRF). Additional instrumentation includes i/o file names, the thread allocations count, applications, and sessions.
Improved integration with RUEI
You can drill down in a context of a request from RUEI to JVMD even if JRF is not deployed. You can also drill down in the context of a session.
Major improvements to the Memory Diagnostics page, including:
Analysis of GC overhead
Visibility into the Young Generation object tenuring
Class loader statistics
List of biggest memory allocators
Sample and compare histogram
JFR integration improvements
You can now enable JFR from Enterprise Manager (Java 8 build 40 and higher) and manage (start, stop, delete) recordings.
Two new JFR reports:
General GC Impact report
JFR Findings report - over 10 findings (and growing) created by the JVM team
The following enhancements have been made to the Middleware Diagnostics Advisor:
New and improved findings
GC overhead
Heap configuration and heap growth
Stuck Thread Growth (redesign of existing finding)
JDBC and JMS finding (redesign of existing finding)
New Findings Timeline view
Central control page allow to enable/disable specific finding on individual servers, domains, or all targets
New Architecture - Metadata driven finding, enabling fast deployment of new findings
Coherence management includes the following enhancements:
Improved topology view to support large clusters.
New heat map view that provides flexible visualization by nodes, caches, services, and host
New support for Manage Coherence Cluster. Automatic discovery with the Oracle WebLogic Domain discovery. The cluster appears under the domain in the navigation tree.
Coherence logs can be viewed from Enterprise Manager user interface. This feature uses the WebLogic log viewer, but is available to managed and standalone clusters.
Administrators can remove multiple unneeded targets (nodes and caches) in one step. Administrators can find all target members (nodes, caches) that are not active (down) and delete all or some in one operation.
User name credentials in the cluster level. Users must provide host credentials to perform cache administration operations. This feature enables you to set stored credentials in the cluster level and have those stored credentials available to all caches. This feature can save significant time, as many clusters have many caches that previously required setting stored credentials in each of them
Message Notification Support for Self Service Application administrators enhances existing capabilities to enable Self Service Application administrators and the SSA subsystems to send messages to one or more SSA users. SSA users can view and manage all of the messages centrally in the Notification center (Inbox). Messages may include service requests, processing failures, reaching quota limits and so forth. SSA users can opt-in to receive emails by subscribing to message topics.
This feature enhances the customer's experience by providing a single interface for administrator collaboration within Enterprise Manager.
Viewing, searching, and correlating messages across log files for non Oracle Java Required Files (JRF) enabled environments is now supported. Viewing, searching, and correlating messages across log files for Oracle Fusion Middleware targets that are unavailable (for example, their status is Down) is now supported.All log files related to a domain may now be downloaded collectively in one operation.Improvements in the usability of target selection and Search By fields have been made.
These enhancements to the log viewer feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control saves administrators time when diagnosing performance problems across middleware software.
This section describes new features and enhancements for the following releases:
Approval Workflow Integration for all Cloud Artifact Creation Requests
Chargeback and Consolidation Planner Plug-in 13.1.1.0 Features
The Snap Clone feature enables the creation of fully functional copies of Oracle databases with minimal storage requirements. With Snap Clone, users can create test master clones containing terabytes of data in just minutes instead of hours, while keeping storage requirements to a minimum.
With this thin cloning method, an RMAN (incremental) backup image of the source database is created on the registered storage volumes. Once the backup completes, a "Test Master Snapshot" of the volume is created. Each time the source database is backed up onto the storage volumes, new snapshots are created. Users can choose any of these snapshots and initiate a snap clone request. The user can provide an SCN or timestamp later than the chosen snapshot and obtain a thin clone copy of the source recovered up to the specified point-in-time.
A new Service Catalog enables users to have a consistent experience, whether they are provisioning into Oracle Cloud or on-premises software. The Service Catalog is better organized, separates out Service Level attributes from the Template attributes, and is backed by a richer set of APIs.
The Cloud Self Service Portal has been redesigned with a new look and feel similar to the Oracle Public Cloud. A new Summary page has been added to show all services. The Service Listing page has a new look. Important summary information is now shown at the top of the page in addition to moving the request section to another tab. Self Service Portal notifications are now shown in a new, fully integrated Notification Center.
This release introduces request settings based on which approvals will be enabled. When request settings are enabled, relevant SSA-USER requests will go through the approval process. SSA-ADMIN users are then able to approve or reject requests. Only the Create requests go through the approval process by default.
The notification center integration done at the self-service portal always keeps users updated on request approval status and all other associated changes to their provisioned targets.
The Chargeback and Consolidation Planner Plug-in 13.1.1.0 includes the following features, as well as the features listed in this section:
Ability to apply ad-hoc charges and discounts for a target, day, and so on
Ability to modify a plan for a target in a past report cycle
New cost center and entities tab in the user interface
Tiered Pricing enables users to specify pricing with different rates depending on how resources are consumed. Tiered Pricing also enables peak/off peak rates to encourage users to consume IT resources at times when resources are used less. This feature enables administrators to drive resource usage towards times when resources have less use.
There are two parts to the Charge Estimation Advisor: the Charge Estimator and the Plan Advisor.
The Charge Estimator enables users to find the likely monthly charges for targets. The charges are estimated based on the past average usage of the targets. Users can choose the currently assigned plan or any other plan for estimation.
The Plan Advisor helps users to define charge rates for a chargeable entity. The charge rates are calculated based on parameters such as recovery cost, recovery time, and weighting of the various chargeable items that the entity contains.
To create the estimate, all of the chargeable entities are identified by the system. The selected charge rates are then applied on the daily average to determine the daily estimated charges. These charges are multiplied by the number of days in a report cycle to determine the total estimated charges. Even though a target is created in the middle of the month, the estimation will be shown as if the target were available for the whole month.
This section describes the following new features and enhancements:
The power of the compliance and configuration management subsystems has been combined to enable drift and consistency management at cloud scale. Users can now define simple definitions consisting of a reference target and comparison template which can be applied at scale and dynamically to thousands of targets. Results are reported in the new Drift Dashboard which provides a summary and detailed results of drifted targets across the entire managed estate.
Complete patching automation for Exadata and Exalytics including features like patch recommendations, auto patch download, scheduled application, granular status tracking, log monitoring and aggregation. Patches can be applied to all or a subset of components providing extreme flexibility.
Automating the application of the quarterly patches will save significant time and reduce errors by ensuring pre-requisite steps and procedures are properly followed, and by applying the component patches in the correct sequence.
The Exadata plug-in has been enhanced to support the lifecycle management of an Exadata 12.1.2.1.0 virtualized environment. VM provisioning on Exadata provides an efficient, completely automated mechanism for scheduled mass deployment of RAC databases. Administrators can now perform the following active management operations from the Exadata target home page to meet on demand or planned capacity needs:
Create and delete RAC databases including VMs
Extend existing clusters (grid infrastructure) including VMs
Scale down cluster and deprovision VMs
There are numerous enhancements and improvements to the compliance framework including:
Users can now associate groups to compliance standards including dynamic and static. Group membership changes like additions and deletions will automatically cause the targets to be associated or unassociated to the compliance standard.
Users can now see the results compliance standard evaluation for a given target prior to associating it. This allows the opportunity to address issues prior to final association which could result in unwanted alerts and results on the compliance dashboard.
Users can also choose to have newly added targets to remain in test status before being moved to full association when using group association feature.
Incident Management integration improvements
Users now have additional granularity and control when selecting types of compliance events in an incident rule set. Users can now choose events for by choosing specific compliance standards/rules or by choosing a name pattern, type or lifecycle state.
Corrective actions can now be associated to Oracle provided or custom rules. Association enables a link to execute the corrective action in the remediation section of the violation event details page.
Missing Patches Rule Type
A new type of rule specifically created to simplify the process of creating checks for missing required patches in user environments. Users can simply enter a single or list of patches OR choose from the list of recommended patches per the downloaded recommended patch catalog without the need to create the SQL using the search wizard. These rules can be added to any repository compliance standard.
Drift and Consistency Rule Types
Rules and Standards of these new types are automatically created when using the new Drift and consistency management functionality. However, users can directly create and manage these standards and rules if they choose.
New and improved emcli and management views enable complete and simplified external compliance orchestration, integration and reporting. This includes tasks like violation suppression and group association.
The ORAchk health check engine from Oracle Support has been integrated with the compliance framework. This includes support for engineered systems (Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, SuperCluster, BDA, ODA, ZDLRA) as well as stand alone databases (single instance and RAC).
Users now have a single location in the compliance dashboard to view the current and historical standings of the managed targets against Oracle best practices and health checks.
This section describes the following new features and enhancements:
Current and historic configuration search have been integrated into the same UI. This now enables users to build, save and manage history searches exactly as they could with current searches previously including the ability to review or edit the auto generated SQL which is useful for report generation.
In addition to choosing configuration items from the target model, users can now search properties with continually updated "look ahead" results making it easier to find items.
Users can now choose between AND and OR conditions when using search to generate reports for a subset of targets.
Includes additional target type support including SQL Server and DB2 databases.
This section includes the following topics:
The Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Big Data Appliance (BDA) Plug-in enables you to monitor and manage the Oracle BDA Mammoth Utility. It enables users to view and modify various BDA Mammoth properties, reimage BDA clusters, and add a new NoSQL Oracle clusters. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c, BDA administrators can execute configuration compliance checks for BDA and enable or disable Kerberos credentials or Audit Vault. Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c also supports the collection of new map-reduced and HDFS metrics such as Reduce Target, Slot Utilization, Jobs Failed, Jobs Killed, JobTracker Alert Rate, TaskTracker Alert Rate, Failed Tasks, and Data Node Alert Rate.Oracle Enterprise Manager support for Oracle BDA Mammoth Utility administration improves the manageability of BDA Mammoth Utility and improves quality of service.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c BDA Plug-in enables you to monitor and manage Oracle Exadoop Appliance. You can perform guided or EM CLI-based discovery of an Exadoop Appliance. Once discovered, the Exadoop Appliance appears as a bigDataSQL target in the Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c targets list. Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c also displays software targets such as Yarn Poo, solr, solrServer, Impala, Spark, SparkMaster, and SparkWorker. The BDA plug-in provides support to start and stop the Exadoop Services.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Big Data Appliance Plug-in simplifies the task of monitoring and administering Oracle Exadoop Appliance.
Users can interactively submit messages to Oracle Java Message Service (JMS) queues and topics, and then look into a queue or durable topic subscriber to see the pending messages. This feature enables users to quickly and interactively validate JMS messaging.
This section lists features and enhancements for managing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).
This enhancement provides the basic scale out and cloning functionality for OBIEE from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. To clone an existing OBIEE domain:
Note:
You must have a database which will host the BIEE repository.Access a BI instance that you want to clone and invoke the profile creation wizard. A deployment procedure is submitted to complete this task.
After a profile is created, a new BI instance can be created from the profile.
Access the BI Instance target in Enterprise Manager and invoke the provisioning wizard. The wizard takes in parameters required to create the new domain.
The deployment procedure to provision the new BIEE domain is run. You can check the status of the procedure run and after it completes you can access the BI dashboards.
The existing BI domain can be scaled out to increase the number of servers or components, as follows:
Note:
You must have a database which will host the OBIEE repository.Navigate to the BI instance that you want to scale out and launch the scale out wizard.
When prompted, enter the inputs for scale out such as the host and number components. A deployment procedure will be submitted for scaling out the environment according to the inputs.
This feature helps you to plan for scale out and automates the BI instance cloning process through Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.
If you want to analyze or diagnose dashboard performance, you can use this feature to get more information about the internal workings of the dashboard.
The feature fetches the logical SQL for the dashboard and redirects you to the SQL details page on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control where you can see the SQL plan and the performance of each query as well as other details.
This feature helps you understand dashboard performance.
This section includes the following topics:
Enterprise Manager 13.1 provides unified hardware (infrastructure) and software management. As part of hardware management, it now provides operating system administration and monitoring. Administrators can monitor metrics, set up notifications, view metric history, and perform common configuration management tasks. The cause of problems with databases, middleware, or applications can be uncovered by drilling down into the details of the relevant operating system, storage, network, or zone.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Systems Infrastructure (EMSI) plug-in provides an enterprise-wide view of the bottom half of the stack and monitoring of most targets including Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems, SPARC/x86 servers, virtual environments (Solaris Zones and OVM for SPARC), ZFS storage appliance and Oracle switches. It also supports monitoring of engineered systems such as Oracle SuperCluster which integrates SPARC compute nodes along with an Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, Exadata Storage Servers and Network switches into a multi-rack system.Each target has its own home page that provides system information, incident summary and resource utilization details. It also provides a comprehensive, customizable set of metrics. For hardware targets, a photorealistic view displays all component details, including any open incidents.The separate modeling of infrastructure target types enables alerts and notifications for specific components, such as a power distribution unit (PDU). Relevant hardware faults will be propagated to the application dashboard, providing true "single pane of glass" management, with one tool managing the entire stack. It also enables hardware targets to participate in configuration management, such as verifying the configuration differences between two storage servers.