Introduction
Companies and institutions rely on PeopleSoft to run their organizations and require those applications to remain available and performant. The multi-tier architecture of PeopleSoft is designed to enable fault tolerance and scalability. Unfortunately this often creates challenges for administrators who end up viewing silos of information when a full view is needed to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. The services that comprise Observability and Management (O&M) enable each administrator to view the application stack through a familiar lens while still having visibility to the whole. This solution document consolidates the steps needed to provide complete observability for a PeopleSoft environment, in OCI or on-premises, using O&M services including OCI Application Performance Monitoring, OCI Database Management, OCI Logging Analytics, OCI Stack Monitoring, and OCI Ops Insights. The document includes prerequisite steps to be completed within the PeopleSoft environment by Application Administrators and Application Database Administrators. After these prerequisites, implementation steps in OCI complete the monitoring setup and enable PeopleSoft monitoring. This solution document provides pointers to the relevant documentation along with best practices so that end-to-end observability is easy to enable. In addition, this document walks through key use cases which highlight the capabilities of the solution.
OCI Observability Overview
Machine learning and AI utilize telemetry collected from all cloud and on-premises sources to enable a holistic solution providing deep monitoring, diagnostics and troubleshooting, and AI-ops and analytics.
Below is a high-level diagram depicting the services comprising the solution and how they relate to the typical components of a PeopleSoft applications environment, followed by brief overviews of each service and sample images from a PeopleSoft environment.
OCI Application Performance Monitoring
OCI Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provides full visibility of user interactions with the PIA webserver and the resulting calls to the application server. APM also executes periodic synthetic availability tests to alert administrators if the PeopleSoft application is down or performing poorly.
OCI Logging Analytics
OCI Logging Analytics (LA) collects logs from virtually any source and provides powerful, machine learning-driven analytics to find patterns and outliers from millions of records or to isolate potential issues and compare clusters of logs against a prior baseline to highlight differences. Searches can be saved for reuse or for creating alarms to detect conditions of interest or concern.
OCI Database Management
OCI Database Management provides deep monitoring of the Oracle Database, including a Performance Hub which allows numerous options to filter and analyze performance of SQL statements, see their execution plan, and analyze and tune them with SQL Tuning Advisor.
OCI Ops Insights
OCI Ops Insights (OPSI) provides long-term resource utilization information from hosts and databases along with machine learning-driven analytics to give insight for capacity planning, identifying resource shortfalls as well as scenarios where excess capacity may exist.
OPSI also provides SQL Insights within the area of Database Insights. SQL Insights provides actionable insights pointing to Degrading SQL statements and Cursor Sharing Issues while also showing numerous other metrics on the types and volumes of SQLs that are handled by the database.
OCI Stack Monitoring
OCI Stack Monitoring (SM) provides full stack discovery and monitoring of all key components of the PeopleSoft application. The summary shows availability and alarms related to all components while the stack view allows breakdown of key metrics related to each of the components including App Servers, Process Schedulers, PIA instances, WebLogic Servers, Databases, and Hosts.
Benefits
A few benefits of this solution include:
- Rapid implementation of full end-to-end observability of PeopleSoft
- Custom solution content to further enhance monitoring and diagnostics
- Best practices provided by product and service experts, demonstrated through use case scenarios
Prerequisites
As described, prerequisite steps must be completed within the PeopleSoft environment before enabling O&M monitoring. Some of these steps will need to be completed by Application DBAs while others will require Application Administrators. The detailed steps are enumerated in online documentation which is linked from the items below.
- PeopleSoft database prerequisites
- PeopleSoft application prerequisites
- Enable PPM Agent on PIA and all Application and Process Scheduler Domains
- Enable JMX Agent on all Application and Process Scheduler Domains
- Make note of the Remote Administration Port and RMI Server Port (8.60 and above)
- Enable the Performance Collator property for all Application and Process Scheduler Domains
- Validate that all PIA instances, as well as all Application and Process Scheduler Domains and ports are properly listed in PSPMAGENT table
- Enable monitoring for Search Engine if desired
Create a database user and provide grants to allow the user to monitor the overall database health for OCI Database Management and also to access specific PeopleSoft tables to allow OCI Stack Monitoring to monitor application health. Complete the task which begins "Grant the privileges required to monitor and manage..." from within the OCI Database Management setup documentation. While this link points to the documentation for an "External" database, note that the same steps are used for cloud databases. For the grants on the PeopleSoft tables, complete the tasks in the section titled "DB Grant Privileges for PeopleSoft Monitoring" in the OCI Stack Monitoring documentation.
The PeopleSoft application components require specific settings to enable OCI Stack Monitoring to discover and monitor the application. Follow the detailed steps in the OCI Stack Monitoring documentation to complete the following items:
Implementation
After completing the application prerequisites, perform the following tasks within OCI and on the PeopleSoft hosts to enable end-to-end monitoring.
Task 1: Create Users, Groups, and Policies
Users may have varying levels of access to view and edit content and configurations within OCI and within each service comprising O&M. Each customer environment is unique but broadly, users should be included in "Admin" groups with full management privileges or "User" groups with more limited privileges. The groups can span multiple O&M services or be aligned to individual services, depending on the unique requirements. The details for defining Users, Groups, and Policies are within the OCI Identity and Access Management documentation and differ slightly for OCI tenants with or without Identity Domains. Each service document linked below provides specific guidance and quick-start approaches to set up policies.
- OCI Stack Monitoring documentation also includes details on required dynamic group definition for Management Agents.
- OCI Logging Analytics documentation includes policies for features that need to be at the tenant level (root compartment), as well as resource policies which can be at compartment or tenant level.
- OCI Application Performance Monitoring documentation includes optional policies for particular use cases.
- OCI Database Management documentation includes information on policies required to enable and to use the service.
- OCI Ops Insights documentation includes specifics for administrators and non-administrative users.
- OCI Management Agents documentation provides information on Management Agents, Oracle Cloud Agents, and Management Gateways which collect logs and metrics from all PeopleSoft components. Each agent type has a dedicated section in the documentation defining prerequisite steps and policy requirements.
Task 2: Enable Services
Some O&M services require initial setup prior to use.
- Create an APM Domain following the documentation.
- Enable the Logging Analytics service following the documentation.
- Decide if Stack Monitoring should monitor resources in their own existing compartments or whether a single consolidated compartment for storing metrics is preferred. Our recommendation is to use a single compartment for best visibility. Stack Monitoring licensing can be set to Standard or Enterprise. Our recommendation is to use Enterprise licensing to gain the additional benefit of anomaly detection, monitoring templates, and maintenance windows. The documentation describes the options for both of these choices.
Task 3: Install Agents
Agents need to be installed and configured in order to collect traces, logs, and metrics from the PeopleSoft infrastructure and application components.
- Install and configure the optional Management Gateway following the documentation.
- Install Management Agents on Hosts following the documentation.
- Enable Management Agent plugin on OCI Compute Instances following the documentation.
- Install and configure APM Agents in WebLogic and configure tracing following the steps in the documentation.
Task 4: Discover Hosts, Database, and PeopleSoft
Discovery in Stack Monitoring allows the service to collect metrics from each component and to automatically construct the topology for the stack. In each discovery flow, there is an option to add the entity to Logging Analytics. After the entities are discovered and added to Logging Analytics, enable the defined Log Sources to collect the logs from each entity type.
- Discover resources in Stack Monitoring following steps in the documentation. We recommend promoting Hosts and Compute Instances first, followed by performing Database discovery, finishing with the PeopleSoft application stack. This sequence will ensure that the topology is constructed properly. Each resource type has additional requirements and suggestions included within the Resource Discovery and Promotion documentation.
- Associate log sources to entities and verify that the agent can read all log files following steps in the documentation. A strong recommendation is to store all PeopleSoft related logs from hosts, database, WebLogic servers, and PeopleSoft components in a single "Log Group". This will allow simplified access control and also allow for a single filter in Logging Analytics searches which will return ALL associated logs for enhanced analysis.
Task 5: Enable Pluggable and Container Database in Database Management
Steps differ for enabling on-premises (External) databases versus cloud databases.
- Enable Database Management for on-premises databases following the documentation.
- Enable Database Management for cloud databases following the documentation.
Task 6: Configure APM
Application Performance Monitoring collects OpenTelemetry-compliant traces and spans from end users interacting with PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and can be configured to collect user names which is recommended to better diagnose user-reported performance problems or errors. Availability monitoring can execute recorded scripts or API calls to continuously confirm application performance and availability.
- Configure Real User Monitoring for PeopleSoft following the steps in the documentation.
- Record and enable synthetic availability monitoring by following steps outlined in the documentation.
Task 7: Configure Ops Insights
Hosts and databases must be enabled for Ops Insights to leverage Capacity Planning, Database Analytics, and other AIOps capabilities.
- Enable hosts following the steps in the documentation.
- Enable databases following the steps in the documentation.
Task 8: Import Solution Content
Follow the steps described in the GitHub repository to import additional content which further enhances the solution value. These resources include APM configuration for span enrichment and APDEX settings as well as custom PeopleSoft dashboards.
Validation and Testing
Follow these steps to ensure that all logs and metrics are being collected from across the PeopleSoft environment.
- Navigate to the PeopleSoft Application resource in Stack Monitoring. Verify that all hosts, databases, and components are showing a status of Available in the resource home page and that the topology is complete with proper associations.
- Navigate to the Log Explorer page in Logging Analytics and check that all expected log sources are appearing. If any expected logs are not present, check for Agent Collection Warnings under Logging Analytics Administration and resolve any reported issues.
- Navigate to APM Service Monitoring and verify that metrics appear for all application services which were defined during APM Agent configuration. Confirm that each PIA server instance appears under the App Servers list. Navigate to the Real User Monitoring page and verify that metrics appear for each Web Application that was defined when configuring the browser agent injection. View the Availability Monitoring page to validate the execution of each monitor from the desired vantage points.
- Navigate to Database Management and view the fleet summary under Oracle Database Diagnostics & Management. Confirm that the PeopleSoft container DB and pluggable DB both appear and are collecting metrics.
- Navigate to Ops Insights Capacity Planning and then select Databases and then CPU to ensure that the PeopleSoft DB has metrics shown. Confirm that the hosts also show metrics under Hosts CPU.
Use Cases
The following use cases describe ways to investigate performance issues in Observability and Management.
Analyze Response Times for Users
This use case relies on having enabled user name capture in plain text in APM agent configuration. When a user reports a performance issue, a great place to begin is in APM.
- Navigate to the APM Real User Monitoring dashboard and review the overall user experience within the suspect time period
to see if the performance issue is wide spread or unique to the user.
Description of the APM Real User Monitoring Overview illustration - Scroll down to the Session performance table and find the session for the impacted user. Use the icon on the table row to drill down to Trace Explorer.
- On the Trace Explorer page, review the traces within the user's session.
Look for the traces with longer duration, or ones related to the user's complaint.
Description of the APM Traces illustration - Investigate the spans of the trace and focus on those with errors or long duration calls.
Description of the APM Slow Traces illustration - In this case the slow call is a Jolt call to ICPanel so navigate to DBM Performance Hub via the configured drilldown, accessible from the 3-dot menu.
- In Performance Hub, set the View option to Load Map, change to Advanced Mode, and set the first dimension to Client,
which is the UserName seen in APM.
Description of the PeopleSoft PDB Client illustration - Select any SQL Id which shows larger activity (average active session) values which were executed by the Client.
Investigate the SQL execution plans and consider using the SQL Tuning Advisor to improve performance.
Description of the PDB Statistics illustration
Analyze Logs for Potential New Issues
Log files contain a treasure trove of information but it can be very difficult to find the important messages buried among the millions of log records that are generated daily. With Logging Analytics, it is easy to locate the most critical information.
- Navigate to the Logging Analytics Log Explorer in the region and compartment where logs are collected for hosts, databases, WebLogic servers, and all PeopleSoft components.
- In the query bar, search for the 'Log Group' where all PeopleSoft related logs are stored (See Task 4). Set the time selector to Last 24 Hours or other time period as desired.
- In the Visualizations pane select the Issues icon under the Analysis section. On the Options dropdown, select the Search options, then choose a value for the baseline time range. Select 24 hours to select the prior 24 hours of logs to compare to the most recent 24 hours.
- The tiles at the top summarize the counts of New Issues and New Outliers seen in the most recent period
which were not seen in the prior period, among other statistics. The interactive table brings new and
likely important logs to the forefront with a handful of clicks.
Description of Logging Analytics illustration
This view is so helpful that we have included it in the dashboard content which can be imported (See Task 8).
Review Proactive Alarms
Alarms are critical to managing enterprise scale applications by exception. Reviewing all alarms related to the complete PeopleSoft environment is essential.
- Navigate to Stack Monitoring and select the PeopleSoft Application from the list of resources to view
the home page.
Description of Stack Monitoring illustration - Click on the Alarms count to see a slide out listing the active alarms.
Description of Stack Monitoring Alarms illustration - To investigate an alarm, click the alarm name to view the alarm definition and the history of
its transitions and suppressions. Click on the resource name to navigate to that
resource home page, in this case, the host which is showing high swap utilization.
Description of Stack Monitoring Host illustration - The resource home page shows all other key metrics with automatic time correlation
to quickly highlight whether other metrics show any cause or effect relationship.
Click the Swap Utilization metric to see a slide out of the history of that metric.
Description of Stack Monitoring Metrics illustration
Analyze Database Performance
Ops Insights provides intelligent analysis and actionable insights based on long-term performance data.
- Navigate to Ops Insights and select Database Insights. Under SQL Insights, select Database Analysis and choose
the proper compartment and database to focus on the PeopleSoft database of interest.
Description of Ops Insights Database illustration - Check the Insights and notice the count of Degrading SQL. Click the count to open a slide out of top degrading SQL
statements
Description of the top 50 degrading SQL illustration - Select a SQL ID from the list to open the SQL analysis of that statement. Notice several execution plans with
differing latency and the additional insight indicating highly variable performance of the SQL statement.
Description of SQL Insights illustration
Next Steps
Suggested next steps include:
- Set up monitoring thresholds for alarms using suggested alarm definitions. Alternatively, use monitoring templates for easier setup and maintenance.
- Create Logging Analytics saved searches and add them to custom dashboards or use them as part of detection rules to trigger alarms for defined conditions. Reference the documentation for saved searches and documentation for detection rules for complete information.
- Create APM queries specific to reporting and diagnostic needs, save them and add them to custom APM menu bars to share and reuse. Consult the Trace Explorer documentation for further details. Configure settings for APM to properly rate application performance and users' satisfaction by adjusting APDEX Thresholds.
Related Links
Additional useful content related to Observability and Management can be found below:
Acknowledgements
- Author - Scott Elvington (Consulting Member of Technical Staff)
- Co-author - Steve Stelting (Consulting Member of Technical Staff)
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O&M Solution: End-to-End PeopleSoft Observability
G33463-02
June 2025
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