Get to Know the Console

This topic provides basic information about the Oracle Cloud Console. To access the Console, you must use a supported browser.

About the Infrastructure Console Home Page

You are directed to a Console depending on how you signed up for Oracle Cloud.

When you sign in, you see either the infrastructure home page or the applications home page. The contents of these pages can vary depending on what services you have purchased. If you've subscribed to Oracle Cloud Applications, you'll be directed to the applications view of the Console.

The home page offers features for both new and experienced users. For new users, the Get Started tab provides features to help you start learning about and working with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The Dashboard tab supports widgets to help you quickly access and monitor your resources and billing usage. This tab further helps you create custom dashboards to monitor diagnostics and key metrics for your tenancy.

Features of the Get Started Tab

The Get Started tab includes features that are particularly helpful for new users or users who want to jump in and quickly create common resources.

Quickstarts

Use Quickstarts to quickly launch and try real solutions while learning about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and capabilities. Quickstarts automate the process of provisioning resources in your tenancy, allowing you to launch complete solutions from the Console home page.

Because Quickstarts use open source tools, you can also use the Quickstarts as sandboxes or as starting points for more complex deployments. The Quickstarts use Oracle Resource Manager, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's managed Terraform service. Terraform automation manages the components and is packaged as a reusable stack that you can use to modify the applications and deployments.

You can also use Resource Manager to apply the same steps used by the Quickstarts to build your own stacks for easy, consistent, and repeatable deployments.

Launch Resources

Use the Launch Resources tiles to navigate directly to common tasks, like creating a VM instance, setting up a network with a wizard, and setting up a load balancer. Use these links to set up your environment.

Start Exploring

The Start Exploring section provides links to tutorials, developer tools, and blogs that demonstrate how to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to build solutions.

  • In the Get Started category, find introductory materials that you can use to learn more about basics, such as information about virtual training classes, key concepts, and introductory demos.
  • In the Deploy Websites & Apps category, find tutorials that leverage both basic and more advanced features available to build solutions.
  • In the Explore Developer Tools category, explore the developer kits, tools, and plug-ins that you can use to facilitate the development of apps and to simplify the management of infrastructure.
  • In the Manage Bills category, learn about the billing and payment tools that to help you manage your service costs.

The Dashboard Tab

The Console Dashboards service allows you to create custom dashboards in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console to monitor resources, diagnostics, and key metrics for your tenancy. Dashboards are data visualization tools that gather data from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services to create charts and tables that give you a quick view into your resource utilization, billing, and system health.

Customizing the Console Home Page

After signing in to the Console for the first time, the Customize your Console window appears. Use this opportunity to select the profiles that best describe your Oracle Cloud work and interests, then click Save. The Console home page will be tailored to your choices, including Service Links recommendations.

Tip

Use the Profile menu to view your tenancy details, update user settings, and customize Console settings.

If you choose to skip this selection, or your interests change, you can update your profile selections in Console Settings at any time.

  1. Open the Profile menu (User menu icon) and click Console Settings.
  2. Under Customize your Console, choose the profiles that best describe you.
  3. Click Save Changes.

Navigating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services

Open the navigation menu in the upper left to work with services and resources. Services and resources are organized by functional group. For example, to work with Compute service instances: Open the navigation menu and click Compute. Under Compute, click Instances.

For faster navigation, you can pin items to make them appear in the Pinned Links section of the Home tab. To pin an item, hover over the menu item and then click the pin to the left of the item name. The Recent section of the Home tab shows recently used navigation items. To quickly find navigation menu items, use the Search box.

Tip

Pinned and recently used items also appear in the Service Links section of your Console home page.

Switching Regions

Your current region is displayed at the top of the Console. If your tenancy is subscribed to multiple regions, you can switch regions by selecting a different region from the Region menu.

Image of the Console with the region selector highlighted.

Working Across Regions

When working within a service, the Console displays resources that are in the currently selected region. So if your tenancy has instances in CompartmentA in US West (Phoenix), and instances in CompartmentA in US East (Ashburn), you can only view the instances in one region at a time, even though the instances are in the same compartment.

Using the following figure as an example, if you select US West (Phoenix) and then select CompartmentA, you see instances 1 and 2 listed. To see instances 3 and 4 in the Console, you must switch to US East (Ashburn) (and then you no longer see instances 1 and 2).

Conceptual rendering of a compartment with instances in different regions

To view resources across regions that are in a specific compartment, you can use the tenancy explorer.

IAM resources (compartments, users, groups, policies, tags, and federation providers) are global, so you can see those resources no matter which region you have selected in the Console.

Changing the Session Time-Out

The Console automatically signs out users a period of inactivity. If you want to change the session idle time-out settings for users in a tenancy, you can use the Console Settings menu.

  1. Open the Profile menu (User menu icon) and click Console Settings.
  2. Under Session time-out, in the menu, select a session idle time-out value. If you choose Custom number of minutes, enter a number from 5 to 60.
  3. Click Save Changes.

To change the session time-out, you must either be in the Administrators group for the tenancy, or a member of the Administrator group must give you permission to manage default preferences for the tenancy. The following is an example policy that grants users permission to manage default preferences for the tenancy:

Allow group <group_name> to manage tenancy-preferences in tenancy

Switching Languages

The Console automatically detects the language setting in your browser. However, if you want to view the Console in a different language, you can change it by using the language selector at the top of the Console.

The language selector supports the following languages:

Supported Languages
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Finnish
  • French (Canada)
  • French (Europe)
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Portuguese (Portugal)
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish

The language you choose persists between sessions. However, the language setting is specific to the browser. If you change to a different browser, the Console displays text in the language last selected in the language selector. If it's the first time you're viewing the Console in a particular browser, the Console displays content according to the browser's language setting.

Contact Support

In the Console, you can create a support request or start a live online chat with an Oracle Support or Sales representative. For more information, see Getting Help and Contacting Support.

Understanding Compartments

After you select a service from the navigation menu, the menu on the left includes the compartments list.

Compartments help you organize resources to make it easier to control access to them. Your root compartment is created for you by Oracle when your tenancy is provisioned. An administrator can create more compartments in the root compartment and then add the access rules to control which users can see and take action in them. To manage compartments, see Managing Compartments.

The list of compartments is filtered to show you only the compartments that you have permission to access. Compartments can be nested, and you might have access to a compartment but not its parent. The names of parent compartments that you don't have permission to access are dimmed, but you can traverse the hierarchy down to the compartment that you do have access to.

Compartments list

After you select a compartment, the Console displays only the resources that you have permission to view in the compartment for the region that you are in. The compartment selection filters the view of your resources. To see resources in another compartment, you must switch to that compartment. To see resources in another region, you must switch to that region, or use the tenancy explorer.

For more details about compartments, see Learn Best Practices for Setting Up Your Tenancy and Managing Compartments.

Filtering the Displayed List of Resources

To help you locate a resource, some resources let you filter the list that is displayed.

Filters include:

State: You can display only the resources that are in the state you select. Valid values for state can vary by resource. Examples are:

  • Any state - includes all lifecycle states for the resource
  • Available
  • Provisioning
  • Terminating
  • Terminated

Availability Domain: For resources that reside in a single availability domain , you can limit the list to the resources that reside in the availability domains you select. For a list of availability domain-specific resources, see Resource Availability.

Tags: Resources that support tagging let you filter the list by tags.

Monitoring Billing Details

Under Your tenancy, the Usage section allows you to get a snapshot of your organization's subscription usage.

Since subscriptions are commitment-specific, you can view the following for each commitment associated with a particular subscription ID:

  • The credits used against the total.
  • The number of days elapsed in the commitment.

When multiple commitments exist in a subscription, the interface indicates that there are multiple active commitments. For example, 1 of 2 is shown for a customer that has two commitments in a subscription.

Click the arrows to page through the active commitments in a subscription. Click the arrows again to page through further commitment details, for cases when multiple subscriptions are present.

The Usage section information can differ whether you are signed in as a parent or child tenancy in an organization:

  • Parent tenancies can see the commitment details for themselves and all child tenancies in the organization that are sharing a subscription. For such a case, you can click the arrows to scroll through and view the credit usage and days elapsed, for both the parent and child tenancies. As a result, the parent tenancy can get a bird's-eye view of all the usage at the commitment level (credit usage and days elapsed) across the entire organization, for every commitment in each subscription.
  • When a child tenancy is signed in, the child tenancy can only see its own commitment details.

To view more detailed cost reporting information, click Analyze costs to go to Cost Analysis. Also see Cost Reporting Integration and Viewing Subscription Details and Costs for more information on organization-based cost reporting. If Oracle Cloud Advisor has found any Cost savings opportunities, you can click View recommendations to review them.

Signing Out

To sign out of the Console, open the Profile menu (User menu icon) and then click Sign Out.

Console Availability

The Console is architected to ensure high availability. At least three Compute nodes per availability domain are maintained, spanning at least two fault domains. For ensuring availability across regions, traffic is load balanced using two regions within multi-region realms. The following diagram shows the Console architecture.

Console service architecture

The Console development process uses a standard Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) process, along with a service and application update process designed to ensure availability and minimize customer impact.

Allowing Access to the Console from Your Network

Firewalls, proxy servers, or other devices that your network administrators use to control access to the internet can affect your ability to connect to the Console.

To allow network access to the Console, your network administrator should add the following URLs to the allowlist of your firewall or proxy server:

*.oracle.com
*.oraclecloud.com
*.oracleinfinity.io
oracle.112.2o7.net
consent.trustarc.com (Console cookie preferences)
Note

Communication with the Console uses the standard TCP ports for HTTP (80) and HTTPS (443).