This section lists frequently asked questions that apply to the following Oracle Utilities cloud services:

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services are Oracle Utilities Application Framework (OUAF) based applications now being offered as cloud (Software-as-a-service) services. These include:

These services are built with a high availability architecture and include Disaster Recovery. The services are deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), generation 2.

The Oracle Utilities Cloud Services are different from on-premises applications in a few ways.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services include features called 'Generalized Data Export' and 'Specialized Data Export' that provides file-based exports of either 'initial' or 'incremental' data in JSON format, written out to Oracle Object Storage. Enabling this functionality involves use of Maintenance Object extract configurations and audit algorithms to enable change data capture when exporting incremental data.

Note that exported files will then need to be moved from Object Storage to other destinations - one option for this file movement is using Oracle Integration Cloud, which can connect to Object Storage via a REST API and then direct the files to other locations. In addition, other clients can also access Object Storage via the REST API.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services includes the following reporting options:

No. Use of Analytics Publisher should be limited to operational reporting ONLY, and, in particular, it should not be used for high volume reporting activities such as bill print generation in CCS, CCBCS, CCS for Retail or BCS.

Instead, customers should use batch-based extracts (such as the Customer Cloud Service bill extract functionality POSTROUT) in conjunction with 3rd party tools/services such as Documaker to ensure smooth, scalable, and successful implementation/operation of their services.

Analytics Publisher can only access the primary database that is provisioned with the associated cloud service (such as CCS, MSCS, WACS, BCS, and so on). External data sources (such as xml data models, and so on) are currently NOT supported.

Oracle is a leader in enterprise cloud solutions, so the reliability and security of the Oracle cloud is of utmost importance to us in order to remain a trusted technology partner for our thousands of utility customers around the world. We have over 1500 cloud operations specialists working tirelessly to maintain optimal cloud performance and we capture global cloud intelligence 24 x 7 x 365 and constantly update our security measures to stay ahead of the latest hacker techniques.

Customers are 100% responsible for controlling access to their Oracle Utilities Cloud Services user interfaces and integration endpoints, and Oracle access is not configured by default. Obviously, Oracle does have the access required to perform back-end administrative tasks (such as database administration activities, infrastructure administration, patching and upgrades, container management, and so son), but none of these include access to unencrypted customer data.

All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, which means that nobody can see your data as it is being transmitted to/from the cloud service, access or query customer data in the underlying database, or otherwise extract or view data in database backups.

No. All data (including primary and secondary disaster recover environments, non-production environments and database backups) is securely (and durably) retained within the region in which the cloud service is deployed.

To 'jump start' Oracle Utilities Cloud Services implementation projects, services includes the use of configuration templates that provide a full configuration solution that is based on North American modern best practices for the systems. Customer Cloud Service & Meter Solution Cloud Service templates are separate for electric, gas, and water.

For more information please refer to the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services - Implementation Accelerators page on My Oracle Support.

Oracle Utilities has built an integration accelerator between our cloud services and Oracle Field Service Cloud using the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, which covers the standard activity use cases we see at all utility customers. It is not fully productized in the sense that we do not have full upgrade-ability across Oracle Field Service Cloud and Oracle Integration Cloud.

Training on Oracle Utilities cloud services is available through the Oracle University Learning Subscription.

Note that training courses for on-premises applications are also applicable to corresponding cloud services, as outlined in the table below:

In addition, documentation for our cloud services is available from our Documentation library, on the Oracle Release Readiness site.

From this page you can select the specific cloud service you're interested in.

Example: Customer Cloud Service

Various documents are available for each cloud service.

https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/readiness/offering.html?offering=customer-21 (Example: Customer Cloud Service)

Includes:

Other information related to our cloud services include the following:

The Customer Success Management (CSM) team is a group within Oracle Utilities that directly supports customers leveraging our cloud services. The CSM objective is to "promote customer satisfaction by advocating on the customer's behalf within Oracle, resulting in a positive continuously improving Oracle Utility cloud experience.". A named Customer Success Manager (also called a "CSM") is allocated to each cloud service customer and is responsible for Service Agreement alignment, Environment Coordination, Service Request (SR) tracking an escalation and cloud & product functionality awareness.

There are several types of updates that are managed by the Oracle Utilities Development Operations (DevOps) team with Oracle Utilities Cloud Services.

Each Oracle Utilities Cloud Service subscription includes the Utilities Testing Accelerator (UTA) which is a component-based tool that can call web services. The delivered components can be linked together into test flows that can either create new data or update existing data, check results of each web service call, and report on results of the flow execution.

Yes, all Oracle Utilities cloud services are SOC compliant.

SOC 1 and 2 Type 2 reports are available for the following cloud services:

A SOC 1 Audit is focused on internal controls related to financial reporting (ICFR).

A SOC 2 Audit is focused on information and IT security identified by any of 5 Trust Services Categories: security, confidentiality, information privacy, processing integrity and availability.

A Type 1 report is an attestation of controls at a service organization at a specific point in time.

A Type 2 report is an attestation of controls at a service organization over a minimum six-month period.

The Critical Batch Window is the term used for allocating time during the day when customers can run critical batch processes serially with the assumption that NO other background batch processes running, and with the fewest number of online users (most often during off-peak hours).

The duration of the Critical Batch window for your implementation is defined in the Sizing Workbook you received as part of the Welcome email from the Cloud Operations team.

The Critical Batch Window may contain the following serialized sub-processes:

Customers can run batch processes throughout the day even during peak hours (depending upon the type of batch process) but should normally plan to run resource intensive batch processes in either part of the critical batch window or during any other available time frame.

Customers may need to purchase additional batch threads for their Production environment if they wish to exceed these processing assumptions.

An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) account allows you to view and manage all of your company's Oracle cloud subscriptions from one place. Most companies will have one cloud account with a number of administrators (at least one primary and one backup, or a number of people with delegated responsibility for different cloud services).

Yes, your cloud account and your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy have the same name.

Universal credits are purchased to access OCI services such as Cloud Object Storage, FastConnect, and so on. The Universal Credits model requires customers to commit to a specific amount of dollars each year; however, their hourly, daily, weekly., and monthly spend can vary based on metrics associated with their cloud service.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services in the new Oracle Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure (OCI) data centers are running on the Cloud Native platform with Kubernetes managing containers and pods, running on Exadata. There are presently about 40 microservice "pods" in our architecture running on the Kubernetes platform grouped into three basic pillars: data plane (including application, networking/security proxies), monitoring (including metrics, alerts, troubleshooting) and a control plane (including upgrades, order processing). Oracle/Oracle Utilities manages this infrastructure.

All Oracle Utilities cloud service environments are single-tenant.

While some components of each service are shared (such as Container Databases), each instance/environment of Oracle Utilities Cloud Services run their own devoted database (a Pluggable Database, or PDB), so there is no mixing of multiple customers' data in a single database.

The logs that have been available historically via the browser in on-premises applications are still available in Oracle Utilities Cloud Services- this includes batch thread logs (stdout and stderr) as well as user trace and debug capabilities. We have a roadmap item for enhanced online debugging of Groovy scripts. See Troubleshooting in the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Implementation Guide for more information.

The standard Oracle Utilities Cloud Services subscription provides three environments (DEV, TEST, and PROD). Many projects may require additional environments, so additional DEV or TEST environments are available for subscription to assist with implementation efforts.

For Customer Cloud Service (CCS) deployments, we generally recommend at least one additional DEV environment, but the quantity ultimately required will depend on the implementation project team.

Note that TEST environments are the same size as PROD environments, whereas DEV environments are sized for few users and less data than TEST and PROD. Please review the service descriptions for detailed information.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services require the use of Oracle Object Storage, which has low fees and facilitates storage of import/export files. Secure API keys are used to connect the cloud service to Object Storage, so Oracle DevOps cannot get hands-on access to the files. Object Storage supports a REST API as well as online drag/drop facilities.

For more on Object Storage, please consult the separate FAQ: https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/storage/object-storage/faq

There are no functional limitations in terms of software features/functions.

There are some restrictions in terms of implementing Oracle Utilities Cloud Services, and these are described in the Oracle Utilities Enterprise SaaS - Capabilities & Restrictions session available on the Oracle University Learning Subscription (Note: although this is currently listed under Customer Cloud Service, it is applicable to all Oracle Utilities Cloud Services).

In summary, the following configuration and implementation tools are included:

With the following restrictions:

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Disaster Recovery (DR) was designed for the United States data center model, where there are multiple (3) availability domains (ADs) within each region. In case of a disaster on the primary instance, Production would be switched over to a secondary instance on another availability domain, with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 12 hours (note that potentially many tenancies will have to be switched over) and with recovery data loss objective (RPO) of no more than 1 hour. Additional information on these service level targets can be found in the service descriptions and associated documents.

Note that in some areas around the world, there may only be one Oracle data center in a region (1 AD center) - and so disaster recovery will need to go 'cross-regional'. Some countries such as Australia and Canada will support two of these 'single domain' regions.

Oracle aims to replicate changes made in the primary instance to the secondary instance on a transactional basis (i.e. as changes are committed to the database) via Active Data Guard.

Oracle aims to test Disaster Recovery at least annually, or more frequently as required (for example when the applications, services or tools are updated) to ensure compliance with Disaster Recovery service level targets. Disaster Recovery plans and tests are reviewed and updated based on experience and feedback, and the teams responsible for Disaster Recovery responsibilities are provided with regular training. Disaster Recovery Evidence Summary Reports may be made available to existing cloud service customers upon request.

It's not possible to list all potential scenarios, however examples include:

The decision is made via a human workflow according to a predefined process, and involves senior Oracle management.

Customers are notified of a disaster declaration and pending failover by the Cloud Operations team and Customer Success Managers, as outlined in the following diagram.

Generally speaking, DR failover is largely seamless and transparent to customers, however Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) should always be used. In some regions, customers may need to configure replication for their subscribed Object Storage containers (if required). Customers using VPN or FastConnect may need additional configuration and/or secondary deployments to continue to use these services after failover. Oracle recommends seeking additional guidance from an OCI Architect if necessary.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services on Oracle Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure (OCI) include the use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Domains where new users can be created, password maintained, and access granted to the cloud service environments and Analytics Publisher. Note that the login is 'single sign-on' - a single userId/password will give access to all environments that the user has rights to access.

Every Oracle Utilities cloud service instance is provisioned into a "cloud account". A customer's cloud account includes a free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Domains instance to provide Identity Management functionality. The available features/functions are described in the Identity and Access Management documentation.

IAM is used to manage authentication of users (including the ability to set up federated authentication / SSO). Authorization / Access to Oracle Utilities Cloud Service level features/functions is controlled from within the applications.

Please note: the free IAM instances provided via customer cloud accounts are the same as for all Oracle cloud services and are not controlled, influenced or used differently by Oracle Utilities.

SQL Queries and Reports are supported through an embedded instance of Analytics Publisher with each cloud service environment. There is also an instance of Database Actions for each environment which can also be used for ad hoc querying on the cloud service database.

For more details about Analytics Publisher in Oracle Utilities Cloud Services, please take a look at the Reporting Tools in the Cloud - For Oracle Utilities Enterprise SaaS session available on the Oracle University Learning Subscription.

Oracle Utilities Analytics Visualization (OUAV) also offers graphical views of the data for query and exploration.

We provide:

For more information about running and troubleshooting batch processing, see Running and Troubleshooting Batch Processing in the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Live Operations Guide.

Each Oracle Utilities Cloud Service includes the Cloud Service Foundation, which provides online self-service mechanisms (which may have been done in other ways in on-premise projects).

For data loading, support is provided for the use of SQL Loader, an Oracle database utility which is very fast at loading file-based data into tables. Note that this is just one aspect of data conversion, which also frequently requires data validation, key generation, etc. The existing staging tables and conversion approach that has long been used in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing is used by Customer Cloud Service.

Please refer to the Oracle Utilities Cloud Service Data Upload Support Guide for details.

Oracle Utilities Cloud Services utilize the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework, which allow customers to determine the length of time they need to keep data (at the maintenance object level) and decide to either drop or archive the data after that retention period. Note that initial database sizing does use some default retention times (most notably around Measurements), and those should be discussed during the sales and licensing process to confirm whether those periods work - and if longer retention is needed, then the customer may need to purchase additional database storage.

More information will be included in the specific product FAQ lists.

Oracle Utilities adheres to more general Oracle Cloud standards that specify a system availability target of 99.7%.

Yes. Customers can generate Performance Hub report via Database Actions. Refer to the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Live Operations Guide for details.

Allowing access to external IP addresses via an "allowlist" is a security measure to allow for outbound calls to only approved destinations. There is also 'blocklisting' where you specify addresses which are not allowed access. Customers will be required to request each external IP address for the "allowlist" or the "blocklist" via a Service Request ticket.

Inbound - there are two kinds of access involved - 1) browser access to the online application and 2) calls to inbound web services. For #1, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) include certain allowlist/blocklist capabilities that are briefly described in the Identity and Access Management with Identity Domains section in the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Administration Guide.

Outbound - here we are concerned with outbound message calls from the application (i.e. Message Senders), and each approved destination currently needs to be set up via an SR ticket for DevOps to configure. Note that the services can only make calls to public IP addresses.

A list of patches is published for each monthly Maintenance Pack (MP) that is applied on top of a given release.

We post details of Maintenance Packs (MP1 through MP6) on specific document pages in My Oracle Support (MOS).

Customers can then easily look up the linked patches in MOS (using the listed Patch ID) and access the Product Fix Design (PFD) if they need it, but the MP notes are not publicly available.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a public facing page with current status and information on previous incidents.

It can be found here: https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/

Note that not all data centers shown currently support Oracle Utilities cloud services.

New Inbound Web Services can be created in the cloud, and these do not require a separate 'deployment' step (since no new Java is involved). These services need to be marked as 'Active'.

Please reference this Knowledge Base article posted in My Oracle Support (MOS) for more information on Web Services in cloud:

When the subscription is provisioned, the customer will be provided with a set of URLs for each environment including two that are used when making IWS calls. IWS calls require a user/pw for authentication, and the user provided must have IAM Identity Domains access to the environment for the 'AppWebServices' and 'AppUser' Application Roles. In addition the corresponding user must exist with the cloud service application.

Testing IWS calls can be done using tools such as SoapUI, where you use the soap or rest URL with the IWS name appended, and set up the user/pw for authorization.

Note that you can call a service to get the WSDL for a Soap IWS, or it can be obtained online in the application on the IWS screen.

The cloud services also provide an adapter that allows Oracle Integration Cloud to access the full catalog of web services in an environment.

Learn more about Oracle Integration Cloud.

Generally speaking, and from a technical standpoint, they do not. It is, however highly recommended that they are co-located in the same region for a couple of key reasons:

Maintenance window frequency and duration are formally described in the service descriptions, however generally speaking we schedule production environment application upgrades and updates to occur on one Saturday a month between 09:00 PM (Saturday) - 06:00 AM (Sunday) data center local time. Oracle typically schedules core system maintenance, if required, to occur on any other Saturday of the month between 09:00 PM (Saturday) - 06:00 AM (Sunday) data center local time.

The Customer Success Manager will work with the customer to coordinate when (i.e. in which specific maintenance window) application patches and updates are deployed to their various environments.

It's not possible to give an answer to this question because critical/emergency patching could require immediate deployment. Oracle will make all reasonable efforts to provide advance notification prior to any patching, and keep downtime to a minimum.

In the very unlikely event that we do need to take a customer environment down we would work with your CSMs and yourselves to find a suitable time to perform this work.

The prescribed limits referred to are the Operational Obligations as defined in the service descriptions. Please refer to the current service description document(s) for the actual specific obligations, but generally speaking they are as follows:

Primarily, in this case, customers must ensure that they are operating a GA version of the cloud service.

This is also where you may choose to operate in the implementation / fast, cut-over / medium or productions lanes (in terms of upgrade versions and maintenance pack frequency).

It is difficult to put arbitrary limitations in place in terms of such situations (given the number of variables in play), but if there is strong business justification for delaying an upgrade (provided via a Service Request in My Oracle Support), then Oracle will consider delaying an upgrade to allow issue resolution within a reasonable, agreed timeframe.

Customers cannot decline, but they can opt to delay adoption (as long as they remain within the operational obligations as defined in the service description(s)). Theoretically a customer could also choose to adopt two quarterly releases at the same time but this approach is not recommended for production environments, as it will result in a switch to the “fast lane” in terms of update frequency.

Yes, there are guides available for preparing to migrate to cloud services. These guides are designed for customers who are planning to go live on-premises, with a view of easing a future migration to cloud service.

These guides include the following:

Yes, as long as they are related to an Oracle Utilities cloud service that the customer is subscribed to.

No, deletes or parent records are not supported via Content Migration Assistant.

Standard edition is all that is required for our integration recipes.

Any further / detailed discussions around the differences between Standard and Enterprise (including the pros and cons of each) should involve Cloud Technology Sales.

As part of your cloud account creation, you select the Home Region which is nearest to either your company, or the majority of your customers (if they are not the same). Once your cloud services are provisioned in that region, your region’s time zone is the time zone used for infrastructure services including your application server and database server. Application debug logs capture your computer’s local time zone and shows the data in your time zone as follows:

In the above example, the timezone is PT which is UT-0700 (italicized).

User logs are maintained on different levels:

* Refer to the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services Cloud Operations Guide for information about submitting service requests.