1 Overview of Enterprise Manager Grid Control

This chapter provides an overview of Enterprise Manager 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:

• Overview of Enterprise Manager Grid Control

• Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture

Overview of Enterprise Manager Grid Control

Enterprise Manager Grid Control is a system management software that delivers centralized monitoring, administration, and life cycle management functionality for the complete 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.

Enterprise Manager Grid Control offers a solution that allows you to monitor and manage the complete Oracle IT infrastructure from a single console. Enterprise Manager 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, Enterprise Manager Grid Control reduces the cost and complexity of managing such grid computing environments. Robust service-level management functionality within Enterprise Manager 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 Enterprise Manager Grid Control, visit our Web site access the following URL:

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

Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture

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

• 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 Enterprise Manager Grid Control console. OMS is deployed to the Oracle Middleware home, which is the parent directory that has the Oracle WebLogic Server home, the Web tier instance files, and, optionally, one or more Oracle homes.

• 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 Enterprise Manager Grid Control console. Since data is stored in the Management Repository, it can be shared between any number of administrators accessing Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

  At the time of installation, the Management Repository is configured in your existing Oracle Database.

• Enterprise Manager Grid Control Console

  Enterprise Manager Grid Control Console is the user interface you see after you install Enterprise Manager Grid Control. With the help of the 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.

The following illustrates the Enterprise Manager Grid Control architecture:

Figure 1-1 Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture

After installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control, what you see is the Enterprise Manager 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.