Oracle Enterprise Manager

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since December 2005. (help, talk)

The computer application Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) aims to manage software produced by Oracle Corporation as well as by some non-Oracle entities.

1 Oracle Enterprise Manager releases
2 OEM functionality
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Oracle Enterprise Manager releases

Oracle Enterprise Manager includes three releases:

[edit] Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

The best-known release aims to manage Oracle databases. The oldest release, it originated as a Java client able to configure and manage databases. Subsequently it gained a web-based interface to do exactly the same.

The OEM for Database is bundled with the Oracle database and runs separate from the database instance. This version allows for management of the database by looking at the database, the computer or computers that it runs on, the services that run on the database, and the applications that connect to the database. The architecture of this version is different than the Oracle Enterprise Manager for Grid Control in that the database control version is a Java application that collects and displays the data.

[edit] Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Server Control

Oracle Application Server also has a web interface to manage the application server.

[edit] Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control

For managing lots of databases and application servers (according to Oracle Corporation, preferably in a grid solution) one could use the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. It can manage multiple instances of Oracle deployment platforms, the most recent edition also allows for management and monitoring of other platforms such as Microsoft .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, NetApp Filers, BEA weblogic and others. Partners and IT organizations can build extensions to Oracle Enterprise Manager, and make them available to other Enterprise Manager users via Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange[1].

The architecture of the OEM for Grid Control has three distinct components: the collection agent (OMA), the aggregation agent (OMS), and the repository agent (OMR). The OMA runs on the target host and collects information on the hardware, operating system, and applications that are running on the target. The OMS runs on one or two servers and collects the data generated by the OMAs. The OMS pulls the information from the OMAs and aggregates the collections into the repository. The OMS also acts as the user interface by generating web pages for administrators to view the status of systems and services. The OMR is an instance of the Oracle database that stores the data collected by the OMS. The OMR can be made highly available or fault tolerant by running it on an Oracle_RAC instance across multiple nodes.

The data presented by the OEM can be customized or manipulated by extending the data that the OMAs collect using plug-ins on each of the OMAs. The analysis of the data can be customized to look at specific collections of data to show how a system is running. These come in the form of management packs as mentioned above. The current release of OEM allows for custom management packs to be designed and configured to monitor any application desired. The data is collected at the OMA using a custom built plug-in and transmitted in XML format back to the OMS which then uses a custom built management pack to store and analyze the data as desired.

[edit] OEM functionality

Oracle Enterprise Manager performs much of its activity through intelligent agents which Oracle Corporation refers to as Oracle Management Agents. These run as autonomous proxy processes on a managed node, and perform execution and monitoring tasks for Oracle Enterprise Manager, communicating using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP or HTTPS). In 10G there are 14 additional packs (plug-ins) which require separate licensing. By default, upon installation, the OMA enables several packs(Change Management, Performance & Tuning, Diagnostics and Configuration Management) without any regard to what is properly licensed. Users need to deselect unlicensed packs after installing the agent on a target database.