Centrally Managing your Enterprise Environment

Purpose

This lesson shows you how to use Grid Control to centrally manage your enterprise environment.

Topics

This module will discuss the following topics:

Overview
Prerequisites
Reviewing the Console Homepage
Monitoring Web Application Performance
Monitoring Application Server Performance
Managing Groups
Automating Maintenance Tasks Using Jobs
Monitoring Database Performance
Assessing Patch Availability Using the Patch Wizard

Overview

Enterprise Manager 10g has a completely new HTML interface that supports remote management
only requiring a browser to support the thin client console. In this lesson, you will look at a web
application and examine a few different ways an administrator would diagnose and resolve SLA
performance and/or availability issues throughout the different components of the Oracle
technology stack.

Prerequisites

Before starting this module, you should have:

1. Reviewed and fulfilled the requirements in the PreInstallation Considerations section of the
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Installation and Basic Configuration 10g Release 1 (10.1)
Documentation.

2. Complete the Installing Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Using a New Database lesson.
3. Complete the Installing the Oracle Database 10g lesson.
4. Complete the first three lessons in Installing the Application Server 10g.

5.Complete the Deploying the Enterprise Manager 10g Linux Management Agent lesson on each
host machine.

6. Complete the Postinstallation Configuration lesson.

7. Complete the Managing Admnistrators Preferences lesson.
8. Complete the Deploying the FAQ OC4J Application lesson.
9. Complete the Adding and Configuring a Web Application lesson.
Reviewing the Console Homepage

The Enterprise Manager Grid Control Homepage provides you with access to the health of your
enterprise infrastructure at the right grain and density. It improves the visibility into the health of
your enterprise grid and complements your corporate strategy of operational excellence. Perform
the following steps:

1. Open your browser and enter the following URL:

http://<gridhost.domain.com>:<webcache port>/em

Login as your emgrid administrator and click Login.

2. The Homepage rolls up all the important information about your enterprise. The Homepage has
the following sections.

The Homepage rolls up all the important information about your enterprise. The Homepage has the
following sections.

Status Shows the total number of monitored Oracle targets. The pie chart shows their
overall availability and corresponding open alerts. This summary information can be
rolled up for any target type.
Target SearchAllows quick access to any target by simply typing in part of the target name.
Critical Patch Displays
Advisoriesany security alerts that are vital to your system.
Deployment Summary
Collects information on your entire configuration including software, patches (OS
 and oracle software level) hardware, etc. This is a rollup of all of your hosts,
software and OS(s) in your enterprise.
Resource Center
Useful Oracle links

To view a particular target type, select Web Application from the All Targets drop down at the
upper left of the homepage.
3. You now see the status of all the Web Applications that Grid Control is monitoring. In the
Deployments Summary section of the homepage, select Operating Systems from the drop down
list.

4. You now see the list of Operating Systems that is being used for all the targets that Grid Control
is monitoring. You want to take a closer look at the Targets. Click the Targets tab.
Monitoring Web Application Performance

In this increasingly competitive environment, web application availability and response times have
a direct and tangible impact on the business bottom line. For example, if you find that an online's
store web pages are slow to respond, you will take your business elsewhere to another site. Poor
application performance can result in costs to your business that may include the loss of customer
loyalty and sales opportunities. To monitor the performance of your Web Application, the
following tasks are performed:

Reviewing your Web Application Alerts

Monitoring your Transaction Performance
Analyzing your Page Performance
Evaluating your Host Performance

Reviewing your Web Application Alerts

Enterprise Manager examines two types of alerts against Web Applications. Horizonally, alerts are
triggered if availability or performance URL thresholds are violated. Vertically, all alerts are shown
from any of the components supporting the web appication stack. Both types are correlated so you
can quickly identify the cause of a performance bottleneck. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Web Application subtab.

2. Select the FAQApp web application.
3. You notice that you have a couple of alerts that could possibly be affecting your application. The
metrics and thresholds are pre-defined and were also specified when you created your application
in the prerequisite lesson. Once the target is added to Enterprise Manager, it is automatically
monitored. Click on one of the slowest page alert messages from the list.
4. A graphical representation of the alert is displayed. On the left are the values of the metric
collected and the warning and critical thresholds. To investigate this particular transaction further,
you want to look at the Transaction Performance. Select the Web Application: FAQApp
breadcrumb.
Monitoring your Transaction Performance

Enterprise Manager ensures the availability and service levels of your key business transactions of
all your critical user communities. You have the flexibility to define what constitutes availability
for your web application, including the key business transaction and critical user communities
using 'beacons'. Alerts with critical and warning thresholds provide a proactive means of
monitoring all your application components. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Transaction performance tab.

2. A more detailed view of the different transaction statistics is displayed. Click Expand All in the
All Transactions section. You may also need to scroll down to see the the list of transactions.
3. The list of transactions that are being monitored for this application are displayed. Each
transaction has drill down capability to provide a breakdown of where the time was spent in that
transaction. Click Manage Transactions.
4. You see the list of transaction that are being monitored. Select the transaction Add FAQ and
click Play.

5. The transaction plays real-time. You may receive a window asking you whether the player
plugin should be downloaded. Click Yes.

6.When asked to login, enter faq/faq then click OK.

7. Click Show Results.
8. A summary and breakdown of the time spent on each page is displayed. You want to take a
closer look at Page Performance. Select the Web Application: FAQApp breadcrumb.
Analyzing your Page Performance

Enterprise Manager tracks all response times of all URLs for all visitors that have accessed your
application. By monitoring the number of hits combined with performance metrics, and analyzing
the response times by URL, domain, region, visitor, and web server, you can clearly assess the
impact of performance degradation problems on your user base. Further drill-downs provide you
with web server response time and load distribution information to help you efficiently balance
server resources.

Enterprise Manager allows you to understand in detail the impact of performance problems as
experienced by all your end users, for all pages, at all times. You can quickly identify all URLs that
are performing poorly and gain confidence that every URL in your application is being monitored
for responsiveness. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Page Performance tab.

2.Another way to examine your web application is through end user performance. End User
Performance shows slowest URLs and selected URL response time experienced by the user.
Enterprise Manager also proactively provides actual end-user performance information about your
visitors by URL, Domain, Region, Visitor, Webserver as well as displays the slowest response
times and how many page hits were encountered. Scroll down.
3. Further down you see the Slowest URLs by time in the OC4J. This breaks down the URLs hit
by users into the 3 middle tier categories with drill down.
Monitoring Host Performance

You can ascertain the problem and identify opportunities to improve the performance of your
system by analyzing the utilization of your system resources. You may check to see if the
performance degradation is because of a change in the system-software or hardware, by comparing
your production infrastructure to your gold standard and investigating any differences that may
exist at the Oracle stack, Operating system or the hardware level.

Your enterprise has probably evolved over the years to include a variety of servers from many
different vendors. To meet your cross-platform management needs and better maintain the OS &
Hardware components of the Oracle technology stack, Enterprise Manager provides you with
monitoring and configuration tracking capabilities for the host. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Components tab.

2. Under the Component Performance and Availability section, you see that your host has no major
performance or availability issues however you can examine it further by clicking on the host to
the right under the Legend.
3.The host homepage provides a quick rollup of your host, its availability, status and configuration.
Click the Performance tab.
4. The Performance tab shows the host performance, its CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, and processes. It
appears that the host performance is fine. If you want to compare your host to datacenter standards,
click the Configuration tab.
5. This page provides a view of the hardware and software(OS and Oracle) configuration. Click
Compare Configuration.
6. Select another host and click Compare.
7.Here is a side-by-side comparison of your two hosts. The comparison focuses on the differences
between the two hosts. This comparison allows you to easily identify differences between two
production hosts to find missing patches, packages or even Oracle or OS software.
Monitoring Application Server Performance

Enterprise Manager allows administrators to manage and monitor their applications and
application server platform from a consolidated tool and in the context of the entire environment.
This increases administrator efficiency, helps deliver on high service levels, and lowers overall
ownership costs. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Targets tab.

2. Click the Application Servers subtab.

3. Click on the application server that the application is deployed on.

4. The Application Server homepage appears. Click the Performance tab.
5. Here is a quick glance at the performance and availability of the Application Server. This shows
both application server and overall host usage across several key metrics. At this point you will
look at another way to manage your grid as a single entity with full drill down capability --
Groups.
Managing Groups

Enterprise Manager's Group home page functionality provides a view with valuable summary
information with the ability to drilldown into specifics. The group home page provides a summary
of open alerts, policy violations, job activity and configuration information across all members of
the group. For database groups, the top 5 instances with potential problems are shown (based on
the wait time (%) and alert histories). In this section, you will create a Database and drill down to
see a summary information. Perform the following steps:

1. Select the Groups subtab.

2. Select Database Group from the Add drop down list box and click Go.
3. Enter the Name Production Databases and select your databases and click Move. Then click
OK.
4. Your Group has been created. Click OK.
5. Select the Production Databases group.
6. The Production Databases group page provides a way to manage your grid as a single entity. As
an administrator, you can run jobs, and see a roll up of all outstanding alerts from the individual
databases in the group. This group's performance can be seen in different ways:
The Wait Time % is a comparative view between all the databases in your group.
The highest alert level against the targets in the group.

In addition, you see a number of policy violations. Click on the number.

7. Each target and the policies it violates are displayed. The policies are defined by different
categories: Security, Configuration, Performance and Storage. At this point, you want to take a
look at automating tasks using the Job system.
Automating Maintenance Tasks Using Jobs

Enterprise Manager provides a job system that allows administrators to automate the running of
adhoc or periodic tasks against individual systems or groups of systems. Administrators can use
any of the predefined database job tasks (e.g. backup, export, import) or define their own logic
using custom OS or SQL scripts. When a job is submitted to a set of targets, the status of all job
executions across all targets is automatically rolled up so that administrators can easily determine
the job executions that have failed and the job executions that have succeeded. In this section, you
will create a job against more than one target. Perform the following steps:

Note: In order for this section in the lesson work successfully, you need to make sure you set your
preferred credentials as outlined in the Managing Administrator Preferences lesson.

1. Before you create your job, you need to set your Preferred Credentials. Select the Preferences
link.
2. Select Preferred Credentials.
3. Select Set Credentials for Databases.

4. Enter the following values for your Oracle Database 10g instance:
Normal Username: hr
Normal Password: <hr_password>
SYSDBA Username: sys
SYSDBA Password: <sys_password>
Host Username: <host_user>
Host Password: <host_password>

Enter the following values for your Infrastructure database:

Normal Username: system

Normal Password: <system_password>
SYSDBA Username: sys
SYSDBA Password: <sys_password>
Host Username: <host_user>
Host Password: <host_password>

Then click Apply.

5. Your preferred credentials have been set. Click the Jobs tab.
6. Select SQL Script from the Create Job pulldown window and click Go.
7. Enter a job name and description then enter select * from employees and click Add under
Databases.
8. Select Database Group as the Type and enter Production Databases in the Name field and
click Search.
9. Select the radio button for Production Databases and click Add.
10. Select the Schedule subtab.
11. Make sure that Immediate and One Time Only are specified and click Submit.
12. Your job was submitted for execution. Select the link to the job.
13. The job you submitted ran against both databases in your database group successfully. Now
you will examine more specifics about a database target. Click the Targets tab.
Monitoring Database Performance

Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control provides a single interface for managing multiple databases
targets, determining overall database health, resolving database issues and automating routine
database administration and maintenance operations. Perform the following steps:

1. Click the Databases subtab.

2. Select your database where the data from the application is stored.
3. The database homepage appears. The database homepage pushes all relevant information to the
top level for easy status assessment. Click the Performance tab.
4. Select SYSDBA from the Connect As drop down. You will see that the sys user is automatically
displayed because that is what is contained in your preferred credentials. Click Login.
5.The database performance page compares all vital metrics between host and database. This page
provides all the information needed to investigate any performance issues in the database. Click on
User I/O from the legend in the Sessions: Waiting and Working section.
6.On the Active Sessions chart, the shaded time period box can be dragged to different time
periods. Click and drag the Shaded box on the Active Sessions chart to focus on a different period
of time.
7.Notice that all the charts adjust to the time period selected. Select the Database breadcrumb.
8.Scroll down to the Related Links section.
9.Select Advisor Central.
10.The Advisor Central page is used as a starting point for running and managing the database
advisors. Advisors are specialized tools that help you analyze the performance of your database,
identify potential problems and bottlenecks, and tune the various components of your database.
Some of the advisors, such as the ADDM advisor and the Segment advisor, run tasks on your
database. Each time an advisor runs a task, it performs its analysis and provides you with the
results of that analysis. Click ADDM.
11.The goal of ADDM is to identify those areas of the system that are consuming the most
database time. ADDM drills down to identify the root cause of problems rather than just the
symtoms and reports the impact that the problem is having on the system overall. This window
shows a range of snapshots for a particular time period. Select the Database breadcrumb.
12.Select the Administration subtab.
13.The Administration page allows you to configure, manage and tune aspects of the database to
improve performance and adjust settings. Click the Database subtab.
Assessing Patch Availability Using the Patch Wizard

The Patching Wizard performs the time consuming work of cross referencing Oracle MetaLink
patch information with the deployments in your environment, and shows which patches apply to a
given deployment. From there you can select a particular patch for deployment and mass deploy
them to selected applicable targets. Perform the following steps:

1. Click on one of your databases from the list.

2. Click the Maintenance tab.
3. Under Deployments, click Patch.
4. Enterprise Manager has a direct connection to oracle.com. This capability loads the metalink
patch search engine with all the relevant information displaying all of the patches that are available
on metalink for this instance. Select a patch from the list and click View Readme.
5. Review the information about the patch and scroll to the bottom of the page.
6.Click the Back button at the bottom of the page. This will return you to the patching wizard.
7.Select the patch you want to deploy from the list and click Next.
8.Enterprise Manager has the capability to host a patch from the repository making it easy to
deploy to multiple Oracle Homes. If there are multiple instances that qualify for the patch, they
would be shown on the left and could be easily moved to the right for download destinations. You
will not apply the patch right now, so click Home.

The other pages in Patch Wizard are as follows:

Stage or Apply: You can install the patch directly from a script.

Schedule: You can have Enterprise Manager download the script and push it out to Oracle Homes
immediately or schedule the patch download to run as a scheduled job.

Summary: You can review all the target destinations, patch information and if the following
locations have enough space to house the patch.