Release 2 (9.0.3)
Part Number B10578-02
 Core |
Platform |
 Contents |
| Oracle9i Application Server Best Practices Release 2 (9.0.3) Part Number B10578-02 |
|
This chapter describes Oracle Enterprise Manager best practices. It features the following topics:
During application development and testing, you can use the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site to monitor the application's resource usage and identify bottlenecks. For example, during a performance or load test you can view memory and CPU use for the Oracle9iAS instance overall and for the application. You can also drill down to find sessions, modules, EJB's, methods, etc., that may be bottlenecks in the application.
Applications that access the database using SQL can be tuned using Oracle Enterprise Manager SQL tuning tools. During development you can use Oracle SQL Analyze to tune your SQL statements before they are deployed on a test system. SQL Analyze can automatically examine your SQL statements and rewrite the statement to improve performance, such as altering the statement so an index can be used. You can also use Oracle Enterprise Manager to view a graphical display of the execution plan for your SQL statement and compare plans and statistics for different versions of your SQL statement.
During testing of your application you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor SQL performance and make further tuning improvements. For example, you can use Oracle Expert to recommend a better indexing strategy to improve data access performance.
Using Oracle9iAS clusters simplifies management and maintenance of your application servers. Clustering enforces consistent configurations across all members of the cluster. So, if you want to make a configuration change in every instance, you only need to make the change once. The clustering mechanism ensures that the new configuration is propagated to all members.
Similarly, clustering also enforces consistency of deployed applications across all application server instances. If you wish to deploy a new application or update an existing deployment on every application server instance in the cluster, you only need to deploy or update the application once. Again, the clustering mechanism ensures that the application is properly deployed to all members. deployment wizard, which can be accessed from the Oracle9iAS Instance home page. The wizard walks you systematically through all the essential deployment options to ensure that your application is deployed correctly.
A simple way to deploy an application is to use the Oracle Enterprise Manager deployment wizard, which can be accessed from the Oracle9iAS Instance home page. The wizard walks you systematically through all the essential deployment options to ensure that your application is deployed correctly.
In some cases, you may want to deploy an application during off-hours or at a certain scheduled time. You can use the Oracle Enterprise Manager job system to schedule a deployment to occur at a selected time. Simply create a script containing the DCM command-line dcmctl deployApplication command and schedule the script via the Oracle Enterprise Manager job system. You can also choose to be alerted when the deployment completes or if there is an error.
There are various ways to deploy Oracle Enterprise Manager, which gives you the flexibility to select the configuration that best suits your needs. If you are working in a simple development or test environment, or if you have a single Oracle9iAS instance to manage, you would probably need only to install the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site. The Web site allows you to directly access all the pages for managing and monitoring the instance. This is the simplest management configuration and is automatically installed with all Oracle9iAS install types.
In a production environment, you may need to set up events and jobs. To use these capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager, you need to install the Oracle Management Server, which is part of the infrastructure installation option. This option also installs the Oracle Enterprise Manager console. The console is a central location from which you can manage your Oracle9iAS instances, databases, and your entire Oracle environment. The Oracle Enterprise Manager framework also supports sharing of information between administrators.
If you plan to manage both your Oracle9iAS instances and your databases from the same management console, install the latest version of Oracle Enterprise Manager. This will ensure that you have the most up-to-date functionality for managing both types of targets.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Event System allows you to monitor your systems for specific conditions, such as loss of service or poor performance. You select tests to run on managed targets, such as an application server instance, and then set the threshold parameters for which you want to be notified. Alarms will always display on the Oracle Enterprise Manager console, but you can also be notified via email or page. Minimally, you should set up events to alert you when Oracle Enterprise Manager detects that your critical or production application servers are unavailable.
You can share events with other administrators, in addition to being able to notify specific administrators when an event condition occurs. This simplifies cooperation between administrators who share responsibility for the same systems. For some event tests, you can also choose to execute a fixit job, such as restarting a component that automatically corrects the problem.
The user-defined event test allows you to define your own scripts that monitor conditions particular to your environment. These event tests can be written in any scripting language, as long as the node that runs the script has the appropriate runtime requirements to execute the script.
The power and flexibility of user-defined event tests lie in the ability to integrate any custom script into the Oracle Enterprise Manager Event System and leverage the system's multi-administrator, lights-out scheduling and notification capabilities. You can, for example, write a script to monitor the performance of a user application, register that script as a user-defined event, and receive alerts from Oracle Enterprise Manager when performance falls below your specified threshold.
Once you have set up Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor for availability and performance issues, you will be alerted when a problem is detected. If Oracle Enterprise Manager detects that an application server component is unavailable, you can use the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site to check the status of the component and restart it if desired. If a performance issue was detected, perhaps with a component or application, you can drill down to the component's home page and view detailed performance and diagnostic information. If needed you can also drill down from the OC4J home page to find the most resource intensive applications, modules, methods, etc. Using these drill downs, you can diagnose and resolve performance issues.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle9iAS instance home page not only displays critical performance data and resource usage for the application server instance, it also includes a link to information for the host. For example, if your application server is performing poorly you can first drill down to the related Host home page to determine if the underlying problem is due to resource problems with the host and other processes, or to services running on the box.
Periodically you should back up your application server configuration. By saving your configurations, you can restore the backed up settings if you ever need to undo configuration changes made. You can use the DCM command-line utility's dcmctl saveInstance command in a script to save the configuration and application information for an application server instance. You can then schedule the backup script to run periodically using the Oracle Enterprise Manager job system. This ensures that backups of your configurations are taken on a regular basis.
Oracle Enterprise Manager's home pages and drill downs include rate and aggregated performance data that are not available via command line or other tools. For example, you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager to view average processing time for a HTTP request, allowing you to zero in on specific requests that may be slow.
Oracle Enterprise Manager also displays performance information, such as average processing time for a servlet for the most recent 5 minutes, in addition to averages since startup. This allows you to more easily diagnose problems in real-time.
After restarting the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site, you may want to navigate to commonly used pages on the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site. This ensures that UI and other software components are pre-loaded. All subsequent accesses to these pages will be faster compared to the first time they are accessed.
When you edit the configuration of Oracle9iAS components, Oracle HTTP Server, OC4J, or OPMN, you should do so via the Oracle Enterprise Manager Web site. Oracle Enterprise Manager will ensure that your configuration changes are properly updated in the repository. If you edit these configuration files manually, you must use the DCM command-line utility (dcmctl) to notify the DCM repository of the changes.
|
 Copyright © 2003 Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved. |
|
