Overview of Fusion Applications Environment Management

The Oracle Cloud Console provides self-service management of the environments where you provision, run, and maintain your Fusion Applications.

When you subscribe to Fusion Applications, you are allotted one production environment, one test environment, and you have the option of purchasing development environments. Before you provision these environments, you set up an environment family. The environment family ensures that the applications on all your environments are maintained, upgraded, and patched at the same levels.

When you create an environment you can configure some options specifically for each environment in the family, including some maintenance schedule options, language packs, and network access control rules. After you create an environment, you can fully manage the lifecycle of the environment, including:

  • View metrics and availability
  • Get detailed information about upcoming scheduled maintenance
  • Monitor maintenance in progress
  • Manage other services that are integrated with your Fusion Applications environment
  • Refresh test and development environments
  • Edit options such as language packs, network access control rules, and some maintenance schedule settings

Fusion Applications Environment Management Concepts

The following concepts are key to understanding Fusion Applications Environment Management.

ENVIRONMENT FAMILY
A logical grouping of environments set up to facilitate management of the related environments. The environment family ensures that the applications on all your environments are maintained, upgraded, and patched at the same levels.
ENVIRONMENT
The platform where applications are provisioned. The environment provides a single management interface for the installed applications.
PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
The production environment supports your day-to-day real-time business operations by authorized users. An environment family is allotted one production environment to provision.
NON-PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
Test and development environments are both non-production environments. The test environment is typically used for staging before application deployment to production and for validation of maintenance updates before the same maintenance is applied to the production environment. An environment family is allotted one test environment to provision. Development environments (also referred to as Additional Test Environments or ATEs) are typically used as individual or collaborative development sandboxes for developing extensions (such as reporting, pages, and interfaces) or integrations with other applications. You must order the number of development environments needed by your organization.
INTEGRATION
Services that are provisioned with your subscribed applications to extend the functionality of your Fusion applications. The Integrations feature of environment management allows you to discover and manage these services from a single place.

Region Availability

Fusion Applications Environment Management are physically hosted in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions. A region is a localized geographic area. For more information, see Regions and Availability Domains.

When you create your environments, you select the region where you want your applications to be provisioned. Fusion Applications Environment Management environment management is available in the following regions:

  • Australia East (Sydney)
  • Australia Southeast (Melbourne)
  • Brazil East (Sao Paulo)
  • Brazil Southeast (Vinhedo)
  • Canada Southeast (Montreal)
  • Canada Southeast (Toronto)
  • Chile Central (Santiago)
  • Germany Central (Frankfurt)
  • India South (Hyderabad)
  • India West (Mumbai)
  • Italy Northwest (Milan)
  • Japan Central (Osaka)
  • Japan East (Tokyo)
  • Netherlands Northwest (Amsterdam)
  • Saudi Arabia West (Jeddah)
  • Singapore (Singapore)
  • Sweden Central (Stockholm)
  • Switzerland North (Zurich)
  • UAE Central (Abu Dhabi)
  • UAE East (Dubai)
  • UK South (London)
  • UK West (Newport)
  • US East (Ashburn)
  • US West (Phoenix)

For the latest information on availability in regions, see Cloud Regions - Infrastructure and Platform Services.

Setting the Console Time Zone for Fusion Applications

You can set the time zone in the Console so that you see time stamps in your preferred time zone for Fusion Applications pages. By default, time stamps are shown in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

To change the time zone setting:

  1. Open the Profile menu and click Console settings.
  2. Under Time Zone in the menu, select the preferred time zone.
  3. Click Save changes.
Important

Currently, only Console pages specific to Fusion Applications display the preferred time zone. These include the environment details and environment family details pages. All other Console pages will still display time stamps in UTC. When UTC is shown, the abbreviation is included in the time stamp, so you'll know which time zone the time stamp represents (for example: Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 13:41:45 UTC).

Understanding OCI Features Used by Fusion Applications Environment Management

Fusion Applications environment management is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and leverages its services to provide features such as authentication and authorization, events, and monitoring. When managing your Fusion Applications environments, you'll interact with OCI, so it is helpful to understand some OCI fundamentals. Following are some key OCI concepts:

COMPARTMENT
A collection of related resources. Compartments are a fundamental component of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for organizing and isolating your cloud resources. You use them to clearly separate resources for the purposes of measuring usage and billing, access (through the use of policies), and isolation (separating the resources for one project or business unit from another). A common approach is to create a compartment for each major part of your organization. For more information, see Understanding Compartments.
REGION

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is physically hosted in regions and availability domains. A region is a localized geographic area, and an availability domain is one or more data centers located within a region. A region is composed of one or more availability domains. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources are either region-specific, such as a virtual cloud network, or availability domain-specific, such as a compute instance. For more information, see Regions and Availability Domains.

Resource Identifiers

Most types of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources have a unique, Oracle-assigned identifier called an Oracle Cloud ID (OCID). For information about the OCID format and other ways to identify your resources, see Resource Identifiers.

Authentication and Authorization

Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK or CLI, and REST API).

An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups , compartments , and policies  that control which users can access which services, which resources, and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users, create and manage the cloud network, create and manage environments, and so on. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies. For details about writing Fusion Applications Environment Management policies, see Fusion Applications Environment Management IAM Policy Reference.

If you're a regular user (not an administrator) who needs to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources that your company owns, contact your administrator to set up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or compartments you should be using.

Getting Started with Fusion Applications Environment Management

The following workflow describes the main tasks to get started working with Fusion Applications environment management:

  1. Order a subscription for Fusion Applications.
  2. Sign in to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. See Signing In for the First Time.
  3. When you sign in, you'll see the Applications Tab of the Oracle Cloud Console. Click Fusion Applications to go to the Overview page.

    Before you create your environments, you should understand environment families and environments by familiarizing yourself with:

  4. When you are ready to create the family and environments, click Start on the Get started with Fusion Applications panel and follow the prompts.
  5. When the environments are ready, an email is sent to the administrator email address provided for the environment during setup. Sign in to your application using the links provided to start using your applications.
  6. (Optionally) Add more users to work with Fusion Applications environment management. See Adding Oracle Cloud Users with Specific Job Functions.