1. Cloud Control Monitoring Guide
  2. Enterprise Monitoring
  3. Managing Events, Incidents, and Problems

Managing Events, Incidents, and Problems

Enterprise Manager's monitoring functionality is built upon the precept of monitoring by exception. This means it monitors and raises events when exception conditions exist in your IT environment and allowing administrators to address them in a timely manner. As discussed earlier, the two most commonly used event types to monitor for are metric alert and target availability. Although these are the most common event types for which Enterprise Manager monitors, there are many others. Available event types include:

  • Target Availability

  • Metric Alert

  • Metric Evaluation Errors

  • Job Status Changes

  • Compliance Standard Rule Violations

  • Compliance Standard Score Violations

  • High Availability

  • Service Level Agreement Alerts

  • User-reported

  • JVM Diagnostics Threshold Violation

By definition, an incident is a unit containing a single, or closely correlated set of events that identify an issue that needs administrator attention within your managed environment. So an incident might be as simple as a single event indicating available space in a tablespace has fallen below a specified limit, or more complex such as an incident consisting of multiple events relating to potential performance issue when a server is running out of resources. Such an incident would contain events relating to the usage of CPU, I/O , and memory resources. Managing by incident gives you the ability to address issues that may consist of any number of causal factors. For an in-depth discussion on incidents and events, see Using Incident Management.

Although incidents can correspond to a single events, incidents more commonly correspond to groups of related events. A large number of discrete events can quickly become unmanageable, but handled as an assemblage of related events, incidents allow you to manage large numbers of event occurrences more effectively.

Once an incident is created, Enterprise Manager makes available a rich set of incident management workflow features that let you to manage and track the incident through its complete lifecycle. Incident management features include:

  • Assign incident ownership.

  • Track the incident resolution status.

  • Set incident priority.

  • Set incident escalation level.

  • Ability to provide a manual summary.

  • Ability to add user comments.

  • Ability to suppress/unsuppress

  • Ability to manually clear the incident.

  • Ability to create a ticket manually.

Problems pertain to the diagnostic incidents and problems stored in Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR), which are automatically raised by Oracle software when it encounters critical errors in the software. When problems are raised for Oracle software, Oracle has determined that the recommended recourse is to open a Service Request (SR), send support the diagnostic logs, and eventually provide a solution from Oracle. A problem represents the underlying root cause of a set of incidents. Enterprise Manager provides features to track and manage the lifecycle of a problem.