Simplifying IT Management

8 Simplifying IT Management

Oracle Orchestration is much more than a simple way to automate IT administrative tasks. The service’s comprehensive orchestration capabilities let you to plan, organize, and automatically implement complex administrative and developmental workflows that are typically carried out in IT and development environments. The following use cases illustrate the flexibility of Oracle Orchestration and how it can save you significant time and effort.

Performing Bulk Configuration Management

Using Oracle Orchestration as a central engine to orchestrate specialized scripts, you can easily deploy or scale entire applications in the cloud with minimal effort. Oracle Orchestration can seamlessly execute complex workflows across your on-premises and cloud resources. For example, the service can run a command to list all running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances under your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and narrow it down by region or with a special tag like test. Oracle Orchestration can then execute a command to shut down or terminate instances that have the test tag defined.

Oracle Orchestration lets you:

Execute workflow operations in bulk across multiple resources either on-demand or schedule.
Configure and store your cloud credentials securely.

Example Bulk Configuration Management Jobs

Cloud resources: Create new Oracle Compute Cloud Service, Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle Java Cloud Service resources.
Component applications: Provision new instances of applications such as DB, Middleware, or Web servers.
Provision entire application stacks: Seamlessly provision complete topologies.

Automating Provisioning and Deployment

You can use Oracle Orchestration as a central engine to orchestrate specialized scripts to deploy or scale entire applications in the cloud. The service also can serve as the fabric to bind the scripts from disparate tools like Chef, Puppet, and so on. to build or update development and QA environments. For example, after building a software release, Oracle Orchestration can automatically deploy the latest build to machines within your IT environment. Some service benefits are:

Lets your organization move toward continuous delivery (CD) by having your build or continuous integration (CI) server trigger an Oracle Orchestration workflow to execute the post-build deployment process and deployment verification testing.
Lets you reuse those same jobs to deploy your software across all environments automatically (zero-click) or with a manual trigger (one-click).
Oracle Orchestration exposes its complete functionality using the REST API interface, making it easy to integrate workflows with existing processes in your organization.

Example Provisioning and Deployment Jobs

Cloud resources: Create new Oracle Compute Cloud Service, Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle Java Cloud Service resources.
Component applications: Provision new instances of database, middleware, web servers, and so on.
Provision entire application stacks: Wire all topologies together.

Managing Incidents with Remediation Actions

Oracle Orchestration can execute immediate and automated actions as a result of an event generated by any discovered entity within your environment. Oracle Management Cloud can execute automated actions via Oracle Orchestration with predetermined workflows to target specific issues, such as patching and remediation actions.

Example Remediation/Preventative Action Jobs

Automatically scale applications based on performance issues detected by Oracle Application Performance Monitoring.
Resize cloud resources based on capacity constraints detected by Oracle Infrastructure Monitoring.
Generate alerts from a saved search (an error in a workflow log, for example) in Oracle Log Analytics.

Remediation Action Workflow Creation and Submission

With Orchestration you can automate remediation actions using workflows. The following is a short introductory guide on how to create and submit a Remediation Action Workflow.

Note:

Remediation Workflow submission require that workflows be authored using V1.0 syntax, for more information on V1.0 syntax please see Author Workflows Using V1.0 Syntax

Table 8-1 Remediation Prerequisites and Actions Required

Task	Description	Configuration Information
Prerequisite: Add Credentials if required	For ENTITY workflows add a SSH host credential, `HostSSHCreds` type, to the agent running on the target host. For REST workflows add a REST credential.	Manage Agent Credentials in Installing and Managing Oracle Management Cloud Agents
Author and test the workflow in Orchestration	Create your ENTITY or REST type workflow using V1.0 syntax.	See: Author Workflows Using V1.0 Syntax
Upload and deploy the workflow script to the host	Submit your workflow using the Workflow Submission API .	Note: Oracle Orchestration REST API documentation access will be limited to approved customers. Please contact your Oracle Support or Sales Representative. For more information see the My Oracle Support note Orchestration Master Note (Doc ID 2229523.1).
Embed the workflow in remediation action definition and perform appropriate variable substitutions	Create your remediation action and embed the workflow created above modifying the variable fields where applicable. For example, the host name should be a variable, so a script can run on any host, depending on what host name is being passed on from an alert.	Example 10: Remediation Workflow
Create Remdiation Action	Publish your remediation action using the Event Service API.	Note: Oracle Orchestration REST API documentation access will be limited to approved customers. Please contact your Oracle Support or Sales Representative. For more information see the My Oracle Support note Orchestration Master Note (Doc ID 2229523.1).
Create an Alert Rule and select the appropriate Remediation Action which was published	Create an alert rule to be notified when something happens, and under remediation action select the action you just published.	When an alert is triggered you can: View alert details by clicking on the alert message in the alerts page See a history of what happened when the alert was triggered. Remediation actions triggered will show as annotations within the alert history. Under the Orchestration Workflows see the Execution details of your workflow, see Monitor a Workflow Submission for more details Monitor the alert, it should clear when the issue is resolved

REST API Use Cases

Oracle Orchestration use cases have been tested and are fully documented in the Oracle Orchestration REST API. This API provides explicit instructions on how to perform actions such as:

Running a Script On Multiple Hosts.
Debug Failed Threads of an Execution.
Running an Ad-hoc SQL Script On Multiple Databases.
Running a Create Instance on Oracle Cloud To Spin A JCS Instance.

Note:

For this release, Oracle Orchestration REST API documentation access will be limited to approved customers. Contact your Oracle Support or Sales Representative for more information about accessing and using the Oracle Orchestration REST API. In addition, see the My Oracle Support note Orchestration Master Note (Doc ID 2229523.1) for the latest information.