1. Integrate, manage and secure E-Business Suite applications using Logging Analytics
  2. Integrate, Manage and Secure E-Business Suite Applications Using Logging Analytics

Integrate, Manage and Secure E-Business Suite Applications Using Logging Analytics

Monitor and analyze key health and performance metrics for Oracle E-Business Suite to maximize availability, increase efficiency, and reduce the total cost of ownership.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics is a fully managed SaaS regional service available in more than 27 regions that provides log collection, indexing, enrichment, querying, visualization, and notification for logs from any IT component running on-premises, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or on a 3rd party cloud. Make sure to onboard Logging Analytics and to set the minimum required policies before implementing Oracle E-Business Suite monitoring. After full implementation users will be able to:

  • View the health and performance details from logs for Oracle E-Business Suite, concurrent processing, and forms system, and other workflow components

  • Use the out-of-the-box dashboards for Oracle E-Business Suite health, forms systems health, and concurrent processing

  • Analyze and troubleshoot Linux host issues by using log data and pre-trained machine learning models in Logging Analytics

  • Monitor Oracle E-Business Suite components such as Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite application hosts, and Oracle Database hosts

Architecture

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics uses Management Agents to securely collect logs from Oracle E-Business Suite components, such as database servers, application servers, and applications. Logging Analytics uses a service-connector to ingest logs from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.

The Oracle E-Business Suite environment consists of the database instance, application tier hosts, and Oracle WebLogic Server. The Oracle E-Business Suite entity model comprises the following:

  • Oracle E-Business Suite: This is a top-level grouping of the entities and has a few metrics associated with the packaged application that it represents.

  • Concurrent manager: This is a composite entity that has hosted entities under it, and has metrics available for monitoring.

  • Forms system: This is a system entity which provides metrics for the forms database sessions.

  • Workflow group: The workflow group has three key hosted entities: Background Engine, Notification Mailer, and Agent Listener, which provide availability metrics.

This architecture assumes an Oracle E-Business Suite deployment with the following characteristics:

  • A single compartment configuration for deploying Oracle E-Business Suite
  • Different subnets host application instances. For example, web servers are in a public subnet and databases are in a private subnet, with additional subnets for redundancy
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics components consist of various agents installed in each subnet to send logs to Logging Analytics

Management Agent can automatically discover the Oracle E-Business Suite environment and send that data to Logging Analytics to create an application and infrastructure entity topology. The management agent must be installed on the same VCN as Oracle E-Business Suite and be able to access Oracle E-Business Suite database. After discovery, you can view and verify the entity topology in Log Explorer's scope filter. You can then associate resources to enable log collection. Management Agents must be installed on all the host nodes identified during discovery. It is installed by default on all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instances as a Oracle Cloud Agent plugin.

The following architecture diagram shows the functional view of how Logging Analytics uses management agents to monitor Oracle Cloud Infrastructure


Description of ebs-logging-analytics-oci.png follows
Description of the illustration ebs-logging-analytics-oci.png

ebs-logging-analytics-oci-oracle.zip

The architecture has the following components:

  • Region

    An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).

  • Availability domains

    Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.

  • Fault domains

    A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Each availability domain has three fault domains with independent power and hardware. When you distribute resources across multiple fault domains, your applications can tolerate physical server failure, system maintenance, and power failures inside a fault domain.

  • Virtual cloud network and subnets

    A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.

  • Route tables

    Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.

  • Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)

    The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.

  • Service gateway

    The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.

  • Management Agent

    Allows a management service plug-in to monitor and collect data from the sources that reside on the hosts or virtual hosts where the Management Agent is installed. The Management Agent can connect to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure directly using the Management Agent service.

  • Management Agent service

    An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service that manages the Management Agents and their lifecycle. Management Agents allow Oracle Cloud services to interact and collect data from the entities that they manage.

  • Oracle Cloud Agent

    A lightweight process that manages plug-ins running on compute instances residing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can deploy Management Agents to compute instances by using the Oracle Cloud Agent.

  • Service Connector Hub

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud message bus platform that offers a single pane of glass for describing, executing, and monitoring movement of data between services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. A service connector specifies a source service, a target service, and optional tasks.

  • Logging

    Provides access to logs from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources.

  • Logging Analytics

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics is a fully managed SaaS regional service available in more than 27 regions that provides collection, indexing, enrichment, query, visualization, and alerting for logs from any IT component running on-premises, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or on a third-party cloud.

  • Application discovery

    A stack management service that allows management agents to discover the components of Oracle E-Business Suite or other applications including their hierarchy or topology and to share with Logging Analytics for log collection.

  • Entity

    An IT or business service that you want to monitor such as Storefront Service, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle WebLogic Server, or a Linux (Host). Entities can be logically linked with each other in Logging Analytics to build application and infrastructure topology for log exploration.

  • Log group

    A resource for log data in logging analytics that supports role-based access control (RBAC). A log group is the logical destination for a log record ingested in Logging Analytics and is different from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure logging service log group.

  • Log source

    Specifies where the log files are located, how to collect them, how to apply data masks, parse the data, extract the data using extended field definitions, enrich the data using labels and enrichment function definitions, and extract the metric data from a log file. Log sources can be used to collect logs continuously from an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Management Agent or can be provided when you perform on-demand upload of a log file to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage collection rules. Whenever logs are collected or sent to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics, a source must be provided to give the context of how to process the logs.

  • Management dashboards

    Primary monitoring interface made up of customizable and extendable dashboards made up of visualizations, filters, and drill-down capabilities for monitoring based on logs and metrics data.

  • Log explorer

    Exploratory interactive analytics graphical user interface for searching, visualizing and analyzing log data in logging analytics.

Recommendations

Your requirements might differ from the architecture described here. Use the following recommendations as a starting point.

  • Log Groups: Define multiple log groups to provide correct access permissions to different teams and avoid sharing sensitive data. Log groups can be based on Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and hosts logs.
  • Cost Management: Logging Analytics service is charged on the volume of data in active and archival storage. In order to be allow troubleshooting of day-to-day issues and get benefits of anomaly detection, pattern detection and other machine learning capabilities, Oracle recommends using an active storage period of 90 days and moving logs older than 90 days to archival storage. Logs from archival stored can be quickly recalled on demand.

Considerations

When designing a highly available application stack in the cloud, consider the following factors:

  • Performance: Query performance is based on time-range and the number of operations such as filters, group-by, and so on. For better query performance, Oracle recommends that you enrich logs with specific labels and fields at the time of ingestion.
  • Security & RBAC: Customize log source definitions to filter any personally identifiable information (PII) data, and enable geolocation enrichment.
  • Availability: Logging Analytics is a fully managed highly available SaaS service.

Deploy

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Analytics app is available as a stack in Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Deploy using the stack in Oracle Cloud Marketplace:

  1. Go to Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
  2. Click Get App.
  3. Follow the on-screen prompts.

Explore More

Learn more about the features of this architecture.

Change Log

This log lists significant changes:

Acknowledgements

  • Author: Kumar Varun
  • Contributor: Robert Lies