What's New in Enterprise Manager 10.2

Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g Release 2 (10.2) includes many new features that add to your ability to monitor and manage your enterprise:

Grid Management Features

• System Monitoring: Lights-out, comprehensive monitoring of all components of the Oracle ecosystem. New features include administrator control of metric collection schedules, Corrective Actions that enable automated responses to alerts, enhancements to SQL-based User-Defined Metrics, Monitoring Templates that enable administrators to apply standardized monitoring settings across their enterprise, and a rich set of out-of-box monitoring reports.

• Bare-Metal Provisioning: Automatically deploy new fully configured systems, including operating systems and software images. Clone existing installations and software images (such as Oracle Cluster Ready Services (CRS), Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Oracle Application Server).

• Real Application Clusters Provisioning and Conversion: Automatically configure RAC database instances to dynamically increase database capacity to meet your needs; convert non-RAC databases to RAC databases.

• Cloning: Simplify deployment of Oracle solutions by cloning fully patched and tested Oracle homes to multiple hosts; clone database instances to create backups of important databases; create new single-node RAC by cloning an existing RAC Oracle home.

• Lights-Out Patching: Quickly identify available patches for the components in your enterprise. Find out which have not been applied and which are critical. Bring those components up to the latest patch level with just a few clicks.

• Policy-Based Monitoring: Apply consistent, proactive management practices across your enterprise using policies and management templates.

• Security Assessment: Automatically assess the security vulnerabilities in your enterprise using the Critical Patch Facility, which provides notifications and a direct link to Oracle Support. Enhanced security rules harden the infrastructure database and host. Violation score reporting helps administrators prioritize security operations.

• Job System: More powerful, feature-rich job system allows you to schedule and run multi-task jobs across multiple targets, as well as receive notifications.

• Group Management: Enhanced group management features enable administrators to manage many components as one. Group pages roll up critical management information, such as overall status and group status history, open alerts and alert history, open policy violations and policy trend overview charts, and out-of-box group performance charts. Simplifies common administrative tasks, such as running jobs, executing custom SQL or host commands, and scheduling maintenance windows. A group "dashboard" enables proactive monitoring of status and alerts across all group members as they occur.

Service Management Features

• Services: Define services to represent the business functions or applications that run in your enterprise. Measure the performance and availability of these services, receive alerts when there is a problem, identify common issues, and diagnose causes of failures.

• Service and System Topologies: Easily define, visualize, and manage key business functions and the assets that they rely upon.

• Service Level Management: Allows you to define service-level goals for availability and performance and more quickly resolve problems through rules, reports, and historical monitoring.

• Dashboards: Offer "at-a-glance" monitoring of all critical indicators for your services and systems.

• Root Cause Analysis: Diagnose service problems quickly using the Root Cause Analysis engine.

Enterprise Reporting Features

• Out-of-Box Reports: Easy-access out-of-box reports for all Oracle components; reports on configuration, performance, service level, and audit.

• Graphical Report Creation: Easy-to-use tool to create custom reports.

• Complete Repository Access: Create reports using any data collected and stored in the Management Repository.

• Report Publishing: Proactively deliver specialized management information to users, managers, and executives using out-of-box reports, custom reports, and secure publishing features, with views accessible by any reporting product.

Database Management Features

• Real Application Clusters Management: Enhanced monitoring of RAC databases and clusters to include Interconnect monitoring, cluster cache coherency diagnostics, CRS monitoring, a graphical topology view; provision RAC deployments, convert single instances, and add nodes to existing clusters.

• Transportable Tablespaces: Allows an administrator to move tablespaces between databases.

• Fast-Start Failover: Allows Data Guard to rapidly and automatically fail over to the standby database without requiring manual intervention, significantly improving the degree of availability as well as the disaster resilience for the system infrastructure.

• Restore Points: Guaranteed recovery of the database to a particular point in time when used with Flashback Database or Flashback Table.

• Enhanced Backup Management: Provides a single view of all backups run against the databases in a domain.

• Access Advisor Enhancements: Enhanced to expose more powerful features of the Access Advisor, including template support, tuning of a single statement, journaling, recommendation implementation status, and action implementation status.

• Automatic Segment Advisor: Proactively identifies segments that have significant wasted space due to data fragmentation, which are good candidates for Online Segment Shrink. You no longer need to run Segment Advisor to determine what segments have data fragmentation.

• Online Segment Shrink Enhancements: Extends Online Segment Shrink capability to large object (LOB) segments and index-organized table (IOT) overflow segments. Online Segments Shrink capability is now extended to all types of segments, further reducing the need to perform other more advanced reorganization methods such as Online Redefinition.

• Oracle Streams: Share message information within a database or from one database to another. Control what information is put into a stream, how the stream flows from database to database, what happens to messages in the stream, and how the stream terminates.

• Adaptive Alert Thresholds: Computes statistical alert thresholds using either static (user-defined) or dynamic (self-adjusting) baselines. Dynamic statistical baselines can significantly improve the accuracy of performance alerting, while reducing exposure to the "false positives" commonly incurred under fixed threshold schemes.

Application Server Management Features

• Extended Middle Tier Management: Allows administrators to discover OracleAS Farms, OracleAS Clusters, Oracle HTTP Server High Availability Groups and OC4J High Availability Groups as composite targets and perform management and administration operations on them.

• Topology Views: Provides graphical topology view of AS Farms, Clusters, and ASs, with current status, alerts and policy violations, and performance metrics. View by host, by request routing overview, or request routing details.

• Custom Aggregate Monitoring: Define monitoring criteria for OracleAS Farms and Clusters using customizable aggregate metrics based on the statistical aggregation of individual metrics of cluster members. View aggregate metrics as an overlay of Òtop best,Ó Òtop worst,Ó or Òpeak thresholdÓ values for individual metrics.

• J2EE Application Monitoring: Hierarchical J2EE application view at the OracleAS cluster level shows performance across the OC4J instances on which it is deployed. Ability to plug customer application JMX MBeans into Grid Control.

• Backup and Restore: Supports full and incremental online backup of middle tier installations. Automatically recover instances to the last full backup, then apply incremental backups.

• OPMN Jobs: Supports immediate or scheduled full process control (start, stop, restart) of OPMN managed components from Grid Control.

• Configuration Management: Extended configuration management support for OracleAS deployments. Collect, search, track, compare, and report on all OracleAS hardware and software installation configurations. Maintain a central inventory of software configuration data of core components for all OracleAS instances.

• Provisioning "Gold" Images: Save standard reference images of application server targets to the central Software Library and deploy to target locations. Standardize the deployments of the application server targets in your enterprise. Create and extend OracleAS Cluster environments by creating new clusters or adding nodes to existing clusters.

• Cloning: Extended cloning support for different types of middle-tier installations, including WebCache, J2EE and WebCache, Portal and Wireless, Business Intelligence, Forms and Reports Services, and Business Intelligence and Forms.

Collaboration Suite Management Features

• Centralized Management: Single target subtab for Collaboration Suite from which you can view your Collaboration Suite deployment(s) and navigate to specific components.

• Automatic Discovery: Collaboration Suite server targets, such as SMTP servers and Calendar servers, are automatically discovered and monitored in Grid Control.

• Service Monitoring: In addition to monitoring server components, Grid Control also monitors Collaboration Suite services from the end-user perspective.

• Custom Service Modeling: Fast setup of services using a simple customization user interface.

• Topology Viewer: Service topology view of your Collaboration Suite deployment showing relationships between different services in Collaboration Suite.

• Root Cause Analysis: Detects the potential root causes of any service outage.

• Dashboards: Services Dashboard for monitoring service availability, performance, usage, and service-level compliance. System Dashboard for monitoring exceptions in your Collaboration Suite system.

• Client System Analyzer: Collects Windows client data and checks for minimum Collaboration Suite requirements.

Broader System Coverage

• Host Management: Out-of-box operating system, hardware, and software monitoring of the hosts on which your applications and services reside. Increased coverage for hardware monitoring, process and file-level monitoring, remote command shells, and remote file editing.

• Enterprise Storage Reports: Reports on allocation, utilization, roll-ups by location, line of business, application, and vendor.

• Support for Network Devices and Storage: Monitor network and storage devices, such as F5 Server Load Balancers and NetApp Filer network storage.

• Support for Non-Oracle Middleware: Support for discovery, performance monitoring, reporting, alerts, process control, and synthetic transactions for third-party application servers and application server clusters, such as IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic.

• External Product Integration: Integrate external products using command line interface, notifications, and bi-directional messages.

• E-Business Suite Management: Plug-in available to enable Grid Control to manage the Oracle Applications Manager, part of the E-Business Suite.

New Management Packs and Plug-ins

In addition to the six management packs available in the previous release, Enterprise Manager 10.2 offers eight new management options: three new standalone management packs and five system monitoring plug-ins.

• New Management Packs:

  • Oracle Service Level Management Pack

  • Oracle Configuration Pack for Non-Oracle Systems

  • Oracle Provisioning Pack

• New Management Plug-ins:

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Hosts

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Non-Oracle Databases

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Non-Oracle Middleware

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Network Devices

  • System Monitoring Plug-in for Storage