An Oracle White Paper

April 2010

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Introduction ........................................................................................ 2
Business Driven Application Management ......................................... 3
User Experience Management ....................................................... 3
Business Transaction Management ............................................... 5
Business Service Management ...................................................... 6
Integrated Application-to-Disk Management ...................................... 7
Packaged Applications Management ............................................. 7
Integrated Middleware Management .............................................. 8
Comprehensive Database Management ........................................ 9
Hardware, Virtualization, and OS Management ........................... 10
Management across the Stack ..................................................... 11
Cloud Management...................................................................... 19
Integrated System Management and Support .................................. 19
Enterprise Manager Integration with My Oracle Support .............. 20
Conclusion ....................................................................................... 21
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Introduction
IT is critical to running any business today. The management of modern IT systems
involves a number of stakeholders. Firstly, there is the Business that invests in
applications to deliver efficiencies and competitive advantages. The operational
management of the applications is the responsibility of a second group, the IT
organization, which uses a variety of tools to manage application health and availability.
Finally, there are IT vendors. These include suppliers of applications, middleware,
databases, operating platforms and management tools.

Despite a common interest in application availability, these groups have historically been
disconnected from each other, ignoring critical dependencies that exist between them.
Technology vendors lack an understanding of business processes supported by
applications. The management tools they offer help to improve efficiency in the IT
organization, automating the management of disparate physical systems, however, these
tools are fragmented and generally focused on managing an individual technology
component. These tools lack business impact as they have no visibility of business
transactions and processes and therefore do not provide IT Operations staff with the
information they need to prioritize activities.

Furthermore, during the course of resolving application issues, IT operations staff may
need to raise service requests with IT vendors. The management tools deployed in the
data center do not provide the vendors with basic, yet critical information such as version
numbers, configuration settings and applied patches. This slows down problem
resolution as the vendor has to spend time helping in-house IT operations gather all the
relevant information to diagnose a problem.

These disconnects between Business, the IT organization and the IT Vendors ultimately
limit the business value delivered by applications.

Today, Oracle is uniquely a supplier of business applications, software and hardware

infrastructure, and a comprehensive set of management tools. This enables a new
business-driven approach to IT management that brings these groups closer together.
With this strategy, Oracle is able to not only increase IT efficiency, but is also able to
build upon this to deliver increased business agility and efficiency. This white paper

2
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

describes the key capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and how they enable
customers to achieve this efficiency and agility. The paper is divided into three main
sections – i) Business Driven Application Management ii) Integrated Application to Disk
(Cloud) Management iii) Integrated Systems Management and Support.

Business Driven Application Management

Yesterday’s breed of applications were less complex than today’s. Often housed within a single
server or few servers, IT staff used key metrics such as CPU utilization or I/O statistics to
determine the overall health of an application. Today, the adoption of Grid, Cloud, SOA, and
composite applications means that an application or business process can span many systems,
some of which could even be provided by external parties, such as partners. In these new
architectures, IT metrics are inadequate in determining the overall health of the application or the
business impact of any infrastructure related incidents. Business owners are concerned with
metrics or KPIs such as number of orders taken, where they are from, and what caused them to
fail, while IT measures and reports on a different set of metrics such as application uptime,
number of sessions and server utilization. The consequence of this is that IT staff can have
difficulty prioritizing their activities as their tools lack any business context for the problems they
are faced with.
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a unique Business-Driven Application Management
approach so that IT can focus on the activities that will have the highest business impact.
This approach starts with User Experience Management, which monitors application users so
that issues they encounter can be detected proactively, without a need for them to contact IT.
This helps IT to fix the issues that are actually impacting end users before they become frustrated
or abandon business transactions.
Business Transaction Management provides an end-to-end view of individual transactions as they
move through different IT services, enabling application support staff to quickly isolate the root-
cause of issues. Business Transaction Management leverages business data to help IT understand
the business context to make decisions based on business criteria rather than technical criteria.
Finally, Business Service Management helps IT determine which services are performing sub-
optimally and visualize the complex and dynamic dependencies that exist between the
components that make up these services. IT administrators can use the resource management
capabilities to diagnose and remediate any issues.
In this section, we will explore these three key capabilities, namely – i) User Experience
Management, ii) Business Transaction Management, iii) Business Service Management.

User Experience Management

3
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Applications play an increasingly strategic role in organizations. Whether deployed internally to

increase efficiency or externally to generate revenue, the performance of these applications has a
growing influence on the overall performance and success of the business.
According to industry experts, over 70% of user issues are still reported by end-users, instead of
by system monitoring tools. For web applications, this creates a significant problem. For
example, a customer who encounters an issue with a web purchase is unlikely to pursue problems
with application support staff. This user can easily switch to a competitor, resulting in lost
custom while the application problem goes completely undetected by IT. To overcome this
challenge it is necessary to manage users proactively to ensure that all users are receive
satisfactory service levels whether they complain or not.
Oracle’s User Experience Management product, Oracle Real User Experience Insight, is
designed to identify and resolve user experience issues before the business is impacted. It
monitors all application end users and tracks not just IT metrics, such as page performance, but
also provides visibility of business metrics, such as order value, customer name and customer
location. Using Real User Experience Insight, application support staff can pinpoint exactly
which users are having problems by identifying technical exceptions, such as which users
experience poor performance or HTTP 404 (Not Found) errors, as well as business exceptions
like “Product Out of Stock” messages.
A customizable dashboard provides high-level information such as the location of users and can
display both business and IT based Key Performance Indicators. Business Transaction Funnels
graphically illustrate the progress of users through a multi-step transaction so that the source of
customer abandonments can be rapidly identified and investigated. Real time charts that show
user satisfaction rates and transaction abandonment rates can be used to accurately pinpoint
when customers started getting frustrated with the application experience. This information can
easily be used to correlate changes to the underlying infrastructure that may have caused
problems.
In the event of an application problem, IT staff can use Real User Experience Insight’s Session
Replay feature to replay actual user issues without the end users involvement. Information
captured, such as customer names and email addresses, can even be used to recover business that
would have otherwise been lost to failed transactions.
Session information can be exported from RUEI and imported into Oracle Application Testing
Suite, so that testing can be done faster and with higher quality.
“There was a point in time when we were more or less driving in the dark…. Now I’m convinced that for us, this product will pay
back within the first six months, easily.”

Oscar Diele, Global vice president of e-commerce, TomTom

Real User Experience Insight has no impact on the performance of applications and requires no
application changes to be made. It measures all user interactions and can be used on traditional

4
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Web-based applications as well as Forms, SOA and AJAX enabled applications. Applications
Accelerators for E-Business Suite (including Oracle Forms), Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne provide an out-of-the-box solution that automatically discovers running
application modules and translates the network objects into human readable business functions.
Delivering a Real User Experience Monitoring solution that is pre-integrated with industry
leading applications offers immediate value to customers as it accelerates the deployment of these
solutions.
RUEI provides in context drill-downs into Enterprise Managers diagnostics tools, for example
for Java, E-Business Suite and Siebel thereby simplifying and accelerating problem diagnostics.
This approach helps IT to focus on high priority applications, users or domains and issues that
may be directly impacting the top line rather than focusing on IT oriented metrics.
Synthetic Monitoring complements Real User Monitoring by executing synthetic performance
and availability tests. Enterprise Manager Beacons execute pre-recorded test transactions against
an application, as if it were an end user performing the same actions. They can test availability
and performance of critical business transactions from a variety of locations and can be used to
establish a performance baseline which can be monitored over time to determine if gradual
slowdowns are occurring.
A wide range of different tests are available supporting many different protocols, including Web
Transactions, Forms Transactions, SOAP/REST, and several others. Setting up service tests
requires no programming expertise. Forms and Web Transactions are simply recorded in a
browser.
Enterprise Manager correlates these services and tests to the underlying infrastructure, so that the
business impact of IT issues can be more easily understood by IT operations staff. Information
about Service Levels and Service Usage can be viewed in Dashboards which can be published to
line of business or end users.
Real User Experience Insight provides integration between real and synthetic user monitoring by
automatically recognizing requests that have been initiated from Enterprise Manager Beacons.
These requests can subsequently be used to create business transaction in RUEI so that service
test performance can be compared to real user performance.

Business Transaction Management

An end user action in a web browser can initiate a business transaction that makes a series of
service calls spanning many different systems and including both synchronous and asynchronous
steps. For example, an order placed on a web site could result in the invocation of the credit
check service, inventory check service, workflow approval service, and, finally, a shipping service.
While the end-user performance may be perfectly acceptable, the business processes could
encounter a number of issues such as getting lost, stuck, facing business or technical exceptions
or slow performance due to resource constraints.

5
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Oracle Enterprise Manager Business Transaction Management (BTM) provides sophisticated

instrumentation for real-time detection, alerting, and remediation of various types of unexpected
business or technical conditions. BTM gives application support teams end-to-end visibility of in-
flight transactions across multiple tiers and applications. It shows the flow and status of each
individual transaction and enables IT staff to narrow down the root cause to a specific service in
an end-to-end business transaction.
Using BTM, application support personnel can search transactions based on message content
and context. Message content could include revenue amount, customer name or product
identifier. In addition to message content, valuable contextual information such as time of arrival
is also collected. By leveraging message payload, it is possible to manage application
performance based on business criteria such as revenue, customer name, or service level
requirements.
As an example, an enterprise might define groups of users with different Service Level
Objectives, such as Platinum, Gold or Silver. With BTM, performance for each of these groups
can be tracked, segmented and measured against the respective Service Level Objective. If
performance for Platinum users is seen to be close to violating the SLO, BTM can trigger some
remedial action, such as throttling of non-Platinum users, thus helping to ensure that the service
level for the most important Platinum users is maintained.
As business and technical exceptions are more commonplace in composite applications, it is
critical to have tools that can detect when these exceptions occur. Using BTM, these exceptions
can be correlated to individual transactions so that the affected parties can easily be pinpointed.
Oracle BTM works for both synchronous and asynchronous transactions and requires no
modification of application code or transaction messages.

Business Service Management

According to a recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates, EMA, on average
businesses spend 60% of the time taken to resolve issues on problem localization and triaging.
The use of SOA and composite applications introduces a number of management challenges.
Firstly, there are layers of abstraction, for example Service Bus, that make it more complex to
determine what is actually servicing a request. Second, services can be composed from many
different application components including web components, Java servlets, EJBs and databases.
In addition, these environments are subject to constant change, and manually maintaining
management tools to reflect the changes is not practical. Traditional tools have been proven to
be inadequate for managing these applications, neither able to localize performance bottlenecks
in multi-domain environments nor report on application impact on the end-to-end requests
being executed in production.
Enterprise Manager Application Performance and Dependency solves these problems. It
automatically discovers the dependencies and relationships that exist in composite applications

6
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

and how the individual components such as EJBs and JDBC calls relate to high-level business
services such as JSPs, Servlets, Portals and Web Services. Application topologies can be
visualized both statically, using application metadata as well as dynamically, which uses runtime
invocations to determine execution call paths.
Furthermore, Application Performance and Dependency automatically detects changes that
occur in composite application topologies, eliminating the need to manually maintain the
monitoring tool.
Administrators can use Application Dependency and Performance to perform a delay analysis.
This can be used to determine the time taken in each component when servicing requests over a
given time period so that the cause of performance bottlenecks in application services can be
traced back to low level components such as Java classes or SQL statements.
Application Performance and Dependency is intended for use in Production environments. It
runs with low overhead and does not require manual instrumentation of code.

Integrated Application-to-Disk Management

While architectures taking advantage of technology such as SOA, Grid, Virtualization and Cloud
provide a more flexible foundation for business applications, they have increased complexity in
the data centre. Spanning multiple tiers and technologies, they are difficult to support using
conventional management tools, which focus on a particular tier or discipline and do not provide
an end-to-end view.
Furthermore, the cost of supporting applications can be a significant drain on IT budgets,
limiting the resources available for new business initiatives.
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides management tools from Application to Disk. It is an
integrated set of tools which provides a complete solution for managing each tier of the stack.
Instead of providing ‘bolted-on’ management tools, the teams who build Oracle
systems/applications and the teams that build the tools to manage them work together, building
manageability into the core infrastructure and applications. This enables an IT infrastructure that
is increasingly self-managing and allows complex multi-tier diagnostic issues to be addressed
easily.
As well as managing the stack from top to bottom, Enterprise Manager enables management
across the stack with vertical management solutions for Application Performance Management,
Lifecycle Management, Configuration Management and Application Quality Management.
Together these solutions help organizations reduce the cost and lower the complexity of
managing applications, while improving IT efficiencies.

Packaged Applications Management

7
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Oracle Application Management Packs provide comprehensive, integrated management solutions

that help you achieve high levels of performance and availability, and reduce the costs of
managing your mission critical business applications.
These management packs provide insight into application specific components alongside the
underlying infrastructure components supporting the application.
Application Management Packs are available for:
• Oracle E-Business Suite
• Siebel
• PeopleSoft Enterprise
• JD Edwards Enterprise One
• Communications Billing & Revenue Management
Application Management Packs have a set of common capabilities such as 1-step Discovery, real
time and historical monitoring, alerting/notifications, Configuration Management and Service
Level Management. There are also application specific capabilities that address key management
challenges for each individual application. Some of these capabilities include E-Business Suite
provisioning, patching and cloning automation, Siebel workflow monitoring and transaction
diagnostics, and centralized log management for PeopleSoft environments. In addition, a number
of Application Accelerators are available for Real User Experience Insight and Application
Testing Suite to provide out-of-the-box solutions for Oracle Applications environments.
For more information on Enterprise Manager’s applications management capabilities please visit
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/app_mgmt.html

Integrated Middleware Management

Enterprise Manager 11g provides a single and comprehensive solution for the discovery,
monitoring, central administration, configuration management, and service level management of
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g components. These new features streamline your ability to
manage Fusion Middleware targets directly from within Enterprise Manager Grid Control,
without having to switch between different user interfaces.
Supported targets include:
• Oracle WebLogic Server
• Oracle SOA Suite and Service Bus
• Oracle Identity Management Suite
• Oracle WebCenter
• Oracle Coherence

8
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

• Oracle Business Intelligence

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g enhances support for Oracle WebLogic Server with significant
improvements in the discovery and monitoring mechanisms. The collection of WebLogic
configurations has been extended to include WebLogic server installation information, including
applied patches and customizable performance metric palettes let administrators create their own
custom dashboards. Enterprise Manager 11g also introduces the ability to automatically
provision WebLogic managed servers into a domain, helping to eliminate errors, lower cost and
increase business agility as additional servers can rapidly be provisioned to support in increased
workload. . This capability is discussed further later in this paper.
Other key features for managing Fusion Middleware include:
• Automated deployment of BPEL processes, OSB services and SOA Composites
• Enterprise Service Dashboards
• Identity and Access Management service tests
• Automatic discovery of WebCenter applications
• Real time and historical monitoring of Coherence caches and nodes
• Support Workbench for Weblogic Server
For further details on how Enterprise Manager can be used to manage your Oracle Fusion
Middleware systems, please see
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/soa_mgmt.html

Comprehensive Database Management

Enterprise Manager provides best-in-class management for the best-in-class database with a
single solution for all aspects of database administration such as performance management,
change and configuration management, testing, provisioning and patching. Oracle Enterprise
Manager 11g adds full management of new Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features.
Performance management has been built in to the database kernel, providing always on, zero
overhead automated management. By taking this approach, database issues are detected and
diagnosed automatically so that they can be repaired before they become major incidents. Real-
time SQL monitoring provides an effective way to identify run-time performance problems with
resource intensive long-running and parallel SQL statements. Enterprise Manager 11g includes
Active Reports which can be saved or e-mailed for off-line analysis and offer the same level of
interactivity as live Enterprise Manager screens, with drill-downs to various levels of detail.
A number of Advisors are available to help DBAs take the most effective course of action when
problems are identified. These advisors include the SQL Tuning Advisor which automates the
tuning process, comprehensively exploring all the possible ways to tune a SQL statement.

9
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Compression Advisor provides an estimate of storage savings that can be realized through the
use of OLTP Table Compression.
Enterprise Manager provides out-of-the-box support for the setup and ongoing management of
HA environments. 11gR2 Grid Plug and Play (GPnP) eliminates RAC per-node configuration
data and the need for explicit add/delete nodes steps. A system administrator can take a
template system image and deploy it on a new node with no additional configuration, thereby
removing many manual operations. Automated procedures are available to migrate from single
instance to RAC, extend RAC clusters and setup Data Guard configurations. The Data
Recovery Advisor provides DBAs with a guided workflow on how best to recover from one or
more high availability failures and RAC performance issues are identified with cluster-wide
performance recommendations. Enterprise Manager 11g enables Active Session History in
standby databases, facilitating performance diagnostics for disaster recovery sites.
Enterprise Manager supports Oracle Exadata V2, allowing you to monitor Exadata Storage
Server targets and gather storage configuration and performance information on storage
components such as Grid Disks and Cell Disks. Real Time SQL Monitoring supports execution
plans that are being executed by Exadata.
Enterprise Manager 11g also adds full support for the security options supported in Oracle
Database 11g, including the ability to monitor and administer Oracle Database Vault enabled
database targets. It allows the propagation of Oracle Database Vault policies such as realms and
command rules from a source database to multiple Database Vault enabled destination databases.

Hardware, Virtualization, and OS Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides solutions to centralize and automate discovery,
provisioning, updating and monitoring of physical and virtual systems. Customers choosing
Oracle’s virtualization technologies can monitor virtualized entities alongside the physical
infrastructure and perform complete lifecycle management of guest virtual machines.
Automated discovery enables systems administrators to determine what hardware has been
provisioned, what virtualization software and operating systems are deployed, as well as access
detailed information about the configuration of each system.
The initial building of systems can involve a lot of manual steps which consumes a lot of time
and is error prone. Using automated procedures, Enterprise Manager can provision Solaris and
Linux onto bare-metal. Customers taking advantage of virtualization can deploy Oracle VM
Server for SPARC and Oracle VM Server for x86 hypervisors and use Enterprise Manager for
the lifecycle management of their virtual machines. In addition, Enterprise Manager Ops Center
can be used to provision Firmware updates.
Enterprise Manager includes solutions for patching operating systems with support for Solaris,
Linux and Windows environments. Enterprise Manager Ops Center includes package
dependency checking for Solaris and Linux systems and also has a patch simulation, allowing a

10
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

dry-run of a patch installation prior to live deployment. Patch Rollbacks ensure systems
administrators can revert to a known good configuration if a patch should fail.
Finally, Enterprise Manager can monitor the performance of hardware and operating systems for
physical and virtual environments. A range of metrics that includes CPU, memory, network, IO
and filesystem utilization are stored for historical analysis and trending.

Management across the Stack

Enterprise Manager’s Application-to-Disk solutions span the lifecycle of systems management
activities from provisioning test environments, through functional and load testing, and the
subsequent deployment into production, where monitoring and diagnostics, patching,
configuration management and scale-up/scale-down operations take place.
The management functions enabled by Enterprise Manager can be categorized as follows:
• Application Performance Management – Helps ensure that applications are meeting
performance and availability objectives.
• Configuration Management and Compliance – Helps establish and maintenance of
software configurations.
• Software Lifecycle Management – Automates software provisioning and patching
operations.
• Application Quality Management – Testing applications prior to production
deployment.

Application Performance Management

A complete Application Performance Management (APM) solution encompasses three separate

stages
1. Identify that a problem exists

11
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

2. Isolate the problem to the correct component

3. Drill down into component to diagnose and resolve problem
Application Performance Management enables application owners to proactively monitor end-
user performance and quickly trace the cause of performance problems. As discussed earlier,
Oracle’s solution includes real end-user monitoring, so that issues are detected proactively.
Application Dependency and Performance helps to determine the components that are most
likely to be the cause of an issue. Once the problem component has been identified, Enterprise
Manager provides tools to drill down into production applications to determine the root cause.
Oracle’s end-to-end solution is optimized for production diagnostics – which can accelerate
resolution times when issues arise. It can also help resolve problems that currently go unresolved,
since they are impossible to reproduce in QA/test environment. There are 3 key characteristics
that support this capability
1. Low production overhead
2. No manual instrumentation
3. Easy to deploy, setup, and use

JVM Diagnostics

Diagnosing problems that have been isolated to the Java tier presents several challenges.
Conventional Java diagnostics tools use manual instrumentation of code, requiring specialized
skills, application knowledge and server restarts. Furthermore, as more instrumentation is
added, the performance overhead increases. These characteristics make such tools unsuitable
for production deployment, hence they are often used by architects or developers working in test
environments. Using these tools means that Java problems can be slow to resolve as it is
necessary to reproduce production problems in non-production environments, something which
may not always be possible.
Oracle JVM Diagnostics is a lightweight Java application monitoring and diagnostics solution
that enables administrators to diagnose performance problems in production. It’s extremely low
overhead (<1%) means that it can be deployed in ‘always-on’ mode and can help solve transient
issues that would be difficult to reproduce outside of the production environment. It does not
require application restarts or complex instrumentation and can be used to identify deep Java
problems or Database issues without any application knowledge.
JVM Diagnostics can find the status and call stacks of all active threads in a JVM. It also
provides cross-tier correlation between Java sessions and database sessions, helping DBAs and
applications administrators pinpoint the line of code and resource causing transaction
bottlenecks.
Java memory leaks can cause application slowdowns or crashes. These problems are difficult to
replicate in test environments and cannot easily be diagnosed in production. Using Oracle’s JVM

12
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Diagnostics, administrators can take multiple snapshots over a period of time and compare the
deltas between object memory allocations to identify the cause of a memory leak.

Advanced Database Diagnostics

The Oracle database is the most self-managing database available today. Database tuning has
historically been a manual task, relying on DBAs to know which metrics to collect, to interpret
these metrics correctly and then need to decide on an appropriate course of action. This
approach leans heavily on experience and trial and error is often used to arrive at a well tuned
system.
Oracle database has advanced diagnostics built-in. This automates manually driven activities,
continuously collecting the most relevant database statistics, interpreting them and advising on
remedial actions, along with a projected benefit. This is enabled through the following key
features
• AWR (Automatic Workload Repository) - This forms the foundation for all the self-
management functionality of Oracle Database. It contains operational statistics about
that particular database and other relevant information. At regular intervals (once an
hour by default), the Database takes a snapshot of all its vital statistics and workload
information and stores them in AWR.
• ASH (Active Session History) - A key component of AWR, is Active Session History
which samples the current state of all active sessions every second and stores it in
memory. This sampled data is also pushed into AWR every hour for the purposes of
performance diagnostics. ASH enables performance analysis of transient problems that
occur for a very short duration.
• ADDM (Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor) – This is a self-diagnostic engine
built right into the Oracle Database kernel. ADDM enables the Oracle Database to
automatically diagnose its performance problems, thereby completely liberating
administrators from this complex and arduous task. For Oracle Real Application
Cluster (RAC) environments, ADDM has a special mode for cluster-wide performance
analysis. In this mode, ADDM analyses the RAC cluster and reports on issues that are
affecting the entire cluster as well as its individual instances.
• Advisors – Within the Oracle database, a set of advisors are available that can help
automate the tuning process. These include the SQL Access Advisor, which can advise
on how to optimize schema design and the SQL Tuning Advisor which will analyze a
statement and explore all the possibilities for tuning.
Together, these features help DBAs spend more time on strategic, high-value activities rather
than constantly reacting to complaints from unhappy and frustrated users.

Configuration Management & Compliance

13
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

In managing all aspects of an enterprise, Configuration Management is a critical component in

day-to-day operations. Enterprise Manager provides a comprehensive configuration management
solution that lowers cost and reduces risk through the automation of IT processes. Using
Enterprise Manager, customers can discover, track, analyze, implement and report on changes,
helping to simplify management, improve service and enforce compliance.

Configuration Discovery and Change Tracking

Many application performance or availability problems can be attributed to incorrect system

configuration. As the number and complexity of systems deployed in the Data Center grows, so
does the challenge of managing these configurations. Organizations can potentially have
thousands of servers deployed with only a handful of staff to manage them.
Many businesses attempt to manually track configuration information in static files such as
spreadsheets, however, this is time consuming, error-prone and lacks sufficient depth of
information. The reality of today is that operations staff are unable to answer simple questions,
such as how many databases or application servers do I have, what versions are they on and what
patches have been applied.
Enterprise Manager automatically performs deep discovery of system configurations including
hardware, virtualization, operating system, database, middleware and applications. This
configuration information is stored in a Configuration Repository which is periodically refreshed
(every 24 hours by default) to provide a historical trail of changes.
Enterprise Manager’s configuration management solution can minimize unplanned outages by:
• Providing a searchable configuration history - Enabling systems administrators to
restore Service Levels faster by quickly pinpointing configuration changes that could be
the root cause of a problem.
• Enabling configuration comparisons – The configuration of deployed systems can be
compared with standardized (Gold) configurations or with similar systems. This enables
proactive management of configurations which helps reduce the number of outages
occurring due to systems being incorrectly configured.
“For SOX compliance we have to ensure configuration of our systems. Enterprise Manager helps us there and also with the
change management lifecycle. We have test, development, pre-production systems. With EM we are able to compare the
systems and whether we have provisioned them in the right way.”

Dr. Werner Rath, Division Manager Operations, Metro Group IT

Policy Driven Configuration Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager comes with a set of pre-defined best-practice configuration and
security policies. The policies address Host, Database, Middleware and Application

14
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

configurations, helping to detect common issues that may later cause problems for applications.
Examples of some of the Configuration Policies provided by Enterprise Manager are:-
• Host open ports check
• Database default passwords check
• WebLogic production mode enabled check
Custom configuration policies enable organizations to create their own policies based on their
own requirements and standards.

Real Time Change Detection

While snapshot based configuration management tools help ensure configurations remain
consistent, they do not detect system changes in real-time, hence there will be a delay between
the change being made and the tool picking it up.
Enterprise Manager’s Configuration Change Console provides real-time change detection against
configuration items. Together with a set of out-of-the-box policy frameworks, it helps
organizations meet regulatory requirements, such as for SOX, PCI and HIPAA. Configuration
Change Console can detect changes to objects such as files and directories, user accounts,
processes server resources, database tables, network devices and the Windows Registry and help
IT understand what change was made, who made it and when. Integration with Change
Management Systems enables them to determine if the change was authorized or unauthorized.

Lifecycle Management of Application Configurations

Differences in the configurations of development, test and production environments can

slowdown application development, as different configuration issues need to be resolved at each
stage of the lifecycle. Therefore, one of the challenges as applications move through
development, test and production environments is ensuring that the configuration of these
systems remains consistent. This can be a complex task as application architectures can span
many different tiers and technologies with configurations stored in a variety of places. A second
challenge is that configurations can change in production environments, causing unexpected
results. IT operations staff need tools that will help them identify what has changed and help
them quickly revert to previous configuration settings.
Application Configuration Console automates the discovery, tracking and propagation of
application configurations across multiple tiers, helping IT staff avoid configuration issues
occurring between development, test and production environments. It also helps them find
configuration anomalies and remedy them by propagating a reference version of a configuration
back to a running system. Application blueprints for common infrastructure and applications are
supplied out-of-the-box and custom blueprints can be created where an out-of-the-box solution
is not available provided.

Software Lifecycle Automation

15
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Enterprise Manager provides the most comprehensive solution for the deployment of Oracle
software, automating the deployment of software, applications and patches. It makes critical data
center operations easy, efficient and scalable resulting in lower operational risk and cost of
ownership
Systems Administrators can use Enterprise Manager to build systems from bare metal with
support for Solaris and Linux installation. Deployment Procedures contain a hierarchal sequence
of steps which can be customized for specific environments. Deployment Procedures also
support secure host authentication using sudo or PAM. Enterprise Manager 11g provides out-
of-the-box Deployment Procedures for provisioning operations such as:
• Oracle Database Provisioning
• Oracle Grid Infrastructure / RAC Provisioning
• One Click Extend Cluster Database
• Delete/Scale Down Oracle Real Application Clusters
• Coherence Node Provisioning
With Enterprise Manager 11g you can automate the provisioning of WebLogic domains and
Fusion Middleware Homes using the Fusion Middleware Deployment procedure, which launches
a guided workflow that enables you to automate the provisioning of:
• WebLogic Domains with a corresponding Oracle Fusion Middleware home which
includes WebLogic Servers and one or more Oracle Homes.
• WebLogic Domains without a corresponding Oracle Fusion Middleware Home
assuming that the Oracle Fusion Middleware software has already been provisioned.
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Homes.
In addition, a “Fusion Middleware Domain Scale Up” Deployment Procedure allows you to scale
up a domain by cloning a managed server or adding a new managed server to an existing cluster.
Systems running in production will inevitably need to be patched. Enterprise Manager includes
an end-to-end patching automation solution that works across the OS, database, management
agents and middleware. The entire patching application can be run in command line (CLI) mode
thereby making it possible to integrate with existing scripts and the application takes care of
appropriate shutdown and startup of services. Such flexibility makes mass deployment of interim
patches and patchsets feasible even in complex multi-tier environments.

"We manage thousands of databases and application servers with Enterprise Manager, and we have been able to reduce the
time for provisioning software from 4 hours down to 1 hour, as well as reduce patch application time from 1 hour down to 1
minute per database. Enterprise Manager Grid Control allows us to automate this process, which translates into huge savings in
time and money."

16
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

Andreas Stephan, Senior DBA Consultant, Bayer Business Services

Customers using Real Application Clusters can use the out-of-the-box ‘Patch Oracle RAC
Database – Rolling’ Deployment Procedure to perform rolling patch operations. This procedure
patches one node at a time so that an application can remain continuously available.

Application Quality Management

Application environments are subject to constant change as new functionality is added and
patches are applied. These changes can introduce performance and availability issues in
production environments that can have serious consequences for a business. Studies have
shown that the cost of fixing problems in production is up to 100 times more expensive than
addressing them in the development phase. Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Application Quality
Management (AQM) solutions focus on finding and fixing application quality and performance
issues prior to production deployment, helping to ensure application users are not impacted. The
solution includes three primary technologies that allow customers to deploy higher quality
applications with less cost, complexity, and effort.
• Oracle Application Testing Suite
• Oracle Real Application Testing
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Data Masking

Oracle Application Testing Suite

Oracle Application Testing Suite provides an integrated solution for load testing, functional
testing, and test management. Oracle Application Testing Suite enables customers to thoroughly
test packaged, Web-based (J2EE or .NET), and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based
applications and their underlying infrastructures to ensure optimum quality, scalability, and
availability. The suite includes:
• Oracle Functional Testing enables comprehensive functional testing of applications and
Web services. Its transaction engine simplifies automated test script generation and
enables the automation of complex applications and associated technologies out of the
box to validate the end user's experience.
• Oracle Load Testing simulates up to tens of thousands of virtual users accessing an
application to measure the effect of the load on application performance.

17
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

• Oracle Test Manager helps users manage the application testing process, allowing them
to define testing requirements, specify and execute manual or automated tests to validate
requirements, and then manage any identified defects.
Application Testing Suite provides custom test “accelerators” for testing Oracle packaged
applications like Oracle e-Business Suite and Siebel, providing more efficient and optimized
testing. Application Testing Suite 9.1 gives application testing teams the ability to import real
user transaction information from Oracle Real User Experience Insight, meaning that test
scenarios can be created faster and with higher quality.

Real Application Testing

To manage change and minimize impact of changes to the database environment, Oracle Real
Application Testing offers an extremely cost-effective and easy-to-use solution that enables
customers to fully assess the outcome of a change in a test environment, take any necessary
corrective action, and then introduce the change safely to production systems. This allows
businesses to continue to benefit from changes without any associated negative impacts such as
performance degradation and outages.
Real Application Testing includes two solutions to test the impact of system changes related to
the database stack or below. Examples of supported changes are OS, hardware and storage
changes, database upgrades, migration to RAC or Exadata V2, enabling Compression and
parameter changes.
• SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) assesses the impact of system changes on SQL
response time by identifying any variation in SQL execution plans and performance
statistics resulting from the change.
• Database Replay can be used to replay a full production workload on a test system to
help determine the overall impact of a change on the workload.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control offers full support for Real Application Testing,
including a new user-friendly workflow for capture of a production workload for Database
Replay Automation. This includes capturing the production workload, creating a test system,
copying over the workload, and running the Database Replay operation of the production
workload against the new test system.

Data Masking

Oracle Enterprise Manager Data Masking provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution to
share production data with internal and external entities, while preventing sensitive or
confidential parts of the information from being disclosed to unauthorized parties. The
application provides out-of-the-box mask primitives for various types of data, such as random
numbers, random digits, random dates, and constants. Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g provides
extended functionality to include compound and condition-based masks. Compound masks
enable sets of interdependent columns to be masked together such as address, city, state and zip

18
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

code. Condition-based masks provide the ability to specify separate mask formats for a
condition, such as a driver’s license format for each state. Lastly, integrated clone and mask
workflow allow secure masking of sensitive data as a part of the database cloning operation from
production to test environments.

Cloud Management
Organizations are adopting Private Clouds in their Data Centers to help them achieve greater
levels of agility and flexibility. In order to manage these Private Clouds, several management
challenges need to be addressed. The Cloud requires agility and flexibility, centralized
management, transparency of where components are running and who is using them and
visibility of the physical and virtual resources that are used to deliver an application.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g provides a set of solutions to help organizations move from
Silo’d application environments to Private Clouds that take advantage of virtualization and
resource sharing. Enterprise Manager provides the foundation for addressing these challenges
with integrated tools for rapid provisioning, mass patching, monitoring, configuration
management, resource usage tracking, application performance management and testing for
Private Clouds.
Enterprise Manager has out-of-the-box support for the management of Cloud infrastructure
including Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Grid, Oracle VM Server for x86,
Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers.
Enterprise Manager can consume multi-tier applications created with Oracle Assembly Builder as
a software image/configuration and deploy it automatically to many locations as needed, helping
with distributed deployment of applications in the cloud.

Integrated System Management and Support

IT Operations staff spend their time on a number of activities including managing system
performance, provisioning new software, patching existing environments, implementing changes
and managing configurations. They use a variety of management tools to help them accomplish
these tasks.
IT Operations may find that they are unable to resolve issues without the support of the vendors
who supply them with hardware and software. To manage this process, the vendors offer
support portals which allow customers to consult knowledge bases, download patches and
updates and raise service requests.
While this approach is the norm, it has a number of shortcomings. The IT Operations tools and
vendor support portals provide different views, even though there is considerable duplication
between these two environments. When raising service requests, customers must manually copy
configuration information into the support portal. Initially this includes high level information
such as product version numbers and platform, however, as a service request progresses it can

19
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

include more detailed information such as patches that have been applied and configuration files.
The vendors will often request trace or log files to help them diagnose issues. The manual
collection of this information prevents IT staff from working on other tasks, dramatically
increases the time it takes for IT vendors to resolve problems and impacts the quality of service
for the deployed application. Furthermore, as configuration information is only provided to the
vendor in the context of a problem faced by a customer the support process is a reactive one.
Applying patches is normal in the course of managing an enterprise application, however, before
patches can be applied a number of checks should be carried out. Firstly, a patch may be
dependent on other patches, which may in turn have dependencies. When multiple patches need
to be applied they need to be checked for conflicts such whether the same object within a library
is updated by more than one patch. Finally, the patches will need to be checked for conflicts
with other patches that have already been applied. Checking patches for these dependencies and
conflicts can take significant time and is prone to errors.

Enterprise Manager Integration with My Oracle Support

Enterprise Manager 11g has full integration with My Oracle Support, enhancing Enterprise
Manager’s ability to serve as a single interface for managing and supporting the enterprise. It
provides seamless access to My Oracle Support pages for managing Service Requests, deploying
patches and reviewing Knowledge Base articles.
Enterprise Manager automatically uploads configuration information to My Oracle Support,
providing Oracle Support with instant access to the comprehensive configuration data they need.
By unifying the information in Enterprise Manager and My Oracle Support, Oracle is able to take
advantage of a Global Configuration Database containing the configuration information of all
customers who opt-in. Combining this configuration data with service request data provides
Oracle with the ability to give proactive problem detection for customer environments, based on
the experiences of other customers running similar configurations, including specific
recommendations for patches that should be applied. This targeted approach makes support
more proactive, helping customers to avoid situations where they raise service requests for
critical issues only to be told that they have encountered a known problem.

“With [My Oracle Support], the time required for gathering information to provide details of our configurations for a service
request went from hours, or in some cases days, to minutes. This greatly increases our ability to troubleshoot problems.”

Raymond Payne, Principal Architect, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

With Oracle Support Workbench, IT Operations staff can raise My Oracle Support Service
Requests against an issue from within Enterprise Manager and package up all relevant
information such as trace files and test cases. This includes issues detected by the system as well
as user defined issues. As this is all done from the Enterprise Manager Console, without having

20
 Oracle White Paper—Enterprise Manager 11g

to switch applications it dramatically speeds up the process of raising Service Requests and cuts
down on the requests for more information. Support Workbench is available for Oracle
Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Enterprise Manager integrated with My Oracle Support enhances patching with the use of Patch
Plans which can check for conflicts in a given set of patches. These can also be used to ensure
that any patches that were previously installed on a system do not conflict with patches that need
to be applied. Should conflicts arise a merged patch will be identified if available or can be
requested if not. When all of the patches have been validated they can be applied in a single
operation, helping to minimize the patching window.

Conclusion
Oracle Enterprise Manager enhances the value of business applications with a business-driven
approach to IT Management.
Business-Driven Application Management helps IT operations staff focus on the activities that
will have the highest business impact by providing them with insight into complex business
processes and giving them visibility of business related metrics for individual transactions.
Enterprise Managers Integrated Application-to-Disk Management provides an integrated, end-to-
end management solution for physical, virtual and private cloud environments that spans all
stages of an application lifecycle
Integrated Systems Management and Support enhances the support experience with accelerated
problem resolution, proactive problem avoidance and advanced patch management for Oracle
systems.

21
White Paper Title
April 2010
Author: Mark McGill
Contributing Authors: Rakesh Dhoopar,
Sandra Cheevers
Copyright © 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and
the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other
Oracle Corporation
warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or
World Headquarters
fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are
500 Oracle Parkway
formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
Redwood Shores, CA 94065
means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.
U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries: Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective

Phone: +1.650.506.7000 owners.

Fax: +1.650.506.7200
oracle.com 0109