In addition to the six management packs available in the previous release, Enterprise Manager 10.2 offers eight new management options: three new standalone management packs and five system monitoring plug-ins. This chapter describes these management options in the following sections:
Oracle offers a number of "Management Packs" that bring together a set of technologies related to a specific area of Enterprise Manager. Each pack has several premium features bundled as part of that pack.
You can grant and revoke access to packs for various databases and application servers in your Enterprise Manager repository by using the Management Pack Access option available from Grid Control's Setup page. When you enable/disable access to a pack, the corresponding features and functions are enabled/disabled. The ability to modify this Management Pack Access functionality is available only to Super Administrators.
When one or more packs on a target monitored by Enterprise Manager are not licensed, access to premium functionality for that target is disabled. For example, the Black Out button located on a target's home page, which you can use to move the target to the blackout state, is enabled when the Oracle Database Diagnostics Pack or the Oracle Application Server Diagnostics Pack is licensed for that target.
To determine the packs used by the current page and to know what packs need to be licensed for any link on that page to be enabled, click the show/hide icon located in the footer of any Enterprise Manager Grid Control page. Enterprise Manager displays this information for all pages the user navigates to during that session.
This section includes descriptions for the following types of management packs:
Enterprise Manager offers four database management packs.
Oracle Diagnostics Pack 10 g for database offers a complete, cost-effective, and easy to use solution for managing the performance of Oracle Database environments by providing unique functionality such as automatic identification of performance bottlenecks, guided problem resolution, and comprehensive system monitoring.
Table 3-1 Feature Highlights of Database Diagnostics Pack
Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)
Oracle Database 10 g built-in, automatic capture of statistics data to be used for real-time and historical performance analysis. Snapshot data, active session history data, and workload reports are part of AWR.
Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics
Measures performance and diagnose poor performance with the Performance page associated drill-downs. This includes historical analysis and alert threshold integration.
Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM)
Oracle Database 10 g built-in functionality that provides out-of-the-box automatic performance analysis based on AWR data.
Operating System Monitoring
Monitors the operating system and hardware in the drill-downs from Grid Control host monitoring pages.
"Memory-Based" performance monitoring to diagnose extremely slow moving databases, including ORADEBUG Hang Analysis, a utility for diagnosing "hung" systems that provides a graphical view of hung sessions along with appropriate details.
Dynamic Metric Baselines
Capture "baselines" of workload performance metrics during "normal" performance and compare against the same metrics during poor performance to diagnose the causes.
Set adaptive thresholds using a pre-defined baseline to accurately detect alert conditions when a system has predictably varying workloads.
Facilitates the monitoring of large number of targets of the same type. Greatly simplifies the task of managing many targets in an enterprise system by providing rich functionality to specify policy settings, metrics, alert thresholds, schedules, and corrective actions that can be taken to remedy alert situations.
Advanced Alert Management
This features includes notification methods, rules, and schedules, metric history and associated drill-downs, ability to set blackouts, associate corrective actions with an alert, user-defined metrics, monitoring templates, adaptive metric thresholds, setting metric baselines, and Memory Access Mode.
Oracle Tuning Pack 10 g offers a set of groundbreaking technologies that automate the application tuning process, thereby significantly lowering database management costs while enhancing performance and reliability, significantly improving resource utilization, and ensuring best application performance without manual intervention.
Table 3-2 Feature Highlights of Database Tuning Pack
SQL Tuning Advisor
Includes the ability to analyze SQL statements and make recommendations for better execution, such as applying SQL Profiles or recommending rewriting of the SQL.
SQL Access Advisor
Can recommend schema changes needed to improve database performance; for example, creation of new indexes and materialized views.
Use the Schema Object Reorganization wizard to reorganize database objects.
This pack automates the time-consuming, costly, and often error-prone process of software configuration, software and hardware inventory tracking, patching, and policy management, ensuring consistency across deployments.
Table 3-3 Feature Highlights of Database Configuration Management Pack
Hardware and software configuration data collection, search, comparison, and analytical reporting.
Includes Critical Patch Advisories, which alert you to critical patches that need to be applied.
Policy and Security Management
This pack gives database administrators the ability to evaluate, plan for, and implement database schema changes to support new application requirements without error and data loss while minimizing downtime. Enables rapid response to new requirements, significantly improves the implementation of complex changes, and ensures that application code is synchronized with detailed baselines.
Table 3-4 Feature Highlights of Database Change Management Pack
Captures database and schema definitions.
Compares baseline with database, or database with database, schema with schema.
Propagates database objects with or without data, update database object definitions.
Enterprise Manager offers two application server management packs.
This pack ensures high availability of mission-critical applications by reducing the complex tasks of diagnosing and correcting application performance problems, lowering the costs of managing web-based applications spanning multiple systems.
Table 3-5 Feature Highlights of Application Server Diagnostics Pack
Transaction Tracing Diagnostics
Historical Performance Analysis
Page Performance Diagnostics
Complete Application Server Monitoring
Advanced Alert Management
Includes notification methods, rules, and schedules, metric history and associated drill-downs, ability to set blackouts, associate corrective actions with an alert, user-defined metrics, and monitoring templates are also part of this feature.
This pack automates the time-consuming, costly, and often error-prone process of software configuration, software and hardware inventory tracking, patching, and policy management, ensuring consistency across deployments.
Table 3-6 Feature Highlights of Application Server Configuration Management Pack
Hardware and software configuration data collection, search, comparison, and analytical reporting.
Includes Critical Patch Advisories, which alert you to critical patches that need to be applied.
Policy and Security Management
Enterprise Manager offers three standalone management packs.
This pack offers a complete, cost-effective, and easy-to-use solution for managing the configurations of non-Oracle targets.
Table 3-7 Feature Highlights of Non-Oracle Configuration Management Pack
Hardware and software configuration data collection, search, comparison, and analytical reporting.
Ensures consistency of deployments and adherence to operation standards. Includes policy violation notifications.
This pack automates deployment of software, applications, and patches. This pack provides functionality for "bare-metal" provisioning of operating systems and software images, cloning of existing installations and software images (such as Oracle Clusterware, Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Application Servers), and patching. It makes critical data center operations easy and scalable, resulting in lower operational risk and cost of ownership.
Table 3-8 Feature Highlights of Provisioning Pack
Policy and Security Management
This pack offers a comprehensive monitoring solution that helps IT organizations achieve high availability and performance, and optimized service levels for their business services. Actively monitors and reports on the availability and performance of services, including end-user business functions, Web applications, and infrastructure components. Using service tests or synthetic transactions executed from remote user locations, businesses can monitor services from the end users' perspective and its correlation to the underlying IT infrastructure. In addition, Service Level Management Pack assesses the business impact of any service problem or failure, and indicates whether service-level goals have been met.
Table 3-9 Feature Highlights of Service Level Management Pack
Model critical business functions based on a wide range of supported protocols.
Complete Service Monitoring
Monitors service availability, performance, usage, and service level compliance.
Measures availability and performance from representative key user locations.
Enhances performance and failure diagnostics by determining root causes and services impacted by failure.
Enterprise Manager offers five management plug-ins that expand your system monitoring coverage to include additional target types, including hosts, non-Oracle databases, non-Oracle middleware, network devices, and storage:
Each plug-in provides the key monitoring features for its respective target type, as described in Table 3-10.
Table 3-10 Key Features of System Monitoring Plug-ins
Real-time and historical performance monitoring. Reduce the complex tasks of diagnosing and correcting performance problems for your targets.
Advanced Alert Management
Includes notification methods, rules, and schedules, metric history and associated drill-downs, ability to set blackouts, associate corrective actions with an alert, user-defined metrics, and monitoring templates are also part of this feature.