Welcome, Oracle really wants to hear from you!

If you are involved with the patching process (evaluating, approving, testing, or deploying), Oracle wants to hear from you. Our primary focus is on how to improve this process for Oracle customers.

We sent this to you because you either; responded to a previous survey or forum post where we asked if you would participate in future studies, or are currently involved with downloading patches from My Oracle Support.

DataCenter Automation and Configuration Management 

Oracle announced this morning that it is acquiring AmberPoint, the leading vendor of SOA management solution. AmberPoint is widely recognized as the Cadillac in the SOA management space, especially with its ability to enforce policies that help improve application performance and security, and to diagnose transactions not only within a composite application, but also across different applications. There had been speculations for a long time whether AmberPoint wanted to stay independent, or be acquired by a larger vendor. The answer is now known, and it is good that we got it.

In Oracle Unified Methods, the elaboration phase follows the inception phase of the project. This is the time when detailed analysis is done and key design decisions get flushed out. Traditionally, the focus of this phase is on coming up with detailed application functional design, especially the user interface, the data model, the means of integrating with other applications and data sources, or even the technical architecture of the deployment, etc... However, the same vigor is often not applied to the tools that are needed to manage the applications.

Happy New Year! May 2010 be a year of maximum uptime and optimal performance for your applications. To kick off this new year, we are releasing a new version of Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Real User Experience Insight 6.0 is Now Available.
Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) is a key technology in Oracle Enterprise Manager's technology arsenal to help application administrators understand how applications are being used and the user experience delivered. Specifically, it helps administrators answer important questions such as:

- Who are the users?
- Where did they come from?
- What have they been doing on the application? What parts of the applications are getting used?

Application Management Blog

Last year, I wrote an article that talked about key issues that IT need to consider when deploying enterprise class business applications. This year for OpenWorld, I decided to follow up the article with a breakout session to discuss the topic. There is a saying that “three minds are better than one”, so I recruited Keith Peters and Deep Ram, who had close to 30 years of combined experience working with application customers, to help put together the presentation.

"I am coming across distinct resistance towards using OEM Grid from those concerned with security around listener ports and data content - on a colocated management infrastructure (same data centre as the given databases)."

My reponse to this was:

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Security and Grid Control

Today I hit the following error while trying to perform a standalone Grid Control Agent install:

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Agent Configuration Assistant Failed

The concept of integrated management software applies to more than just monitoring and diagnostics. Unfortunately, when it comes to remediation, there is no single integrated tool that can do the job across the entire environment. A good policy is look for tools that provide the most automation. The next thing to look for is using as few tools as possible. One interesting approach is to perform post mortem on some recent problems and see if you could have reduced Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) with more automation and whether you could eliminate certain tools by extending the use of other tools.

Finally I had the time to install the new release on my virtual machine. I first installed the new Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 and then Oracle Database 11.2.0.1 Enterprise Edition. After the usual Linux customizations (less than the last time, though), the Database installation itself was pretty fast & easy. Boy that was much harder in the old days with version 7.

When a problem occurs, the amount of time it takes to identify the root cause and apply remedy directly impacts the overall service level of the application. Because modern application environments are built on a wide array of technologies, each of which may impact performance and availability in a particular way, it is important to have a complete set of tools to access the specific diagnostic information for each technology.

I just conducted a successful third workshop in the Oracle Office at Singapore
on Grid Provisioning and Patch Automation. There were a lot of attendees.

I introduced the clients to Grid technology, including RAC, Weblogic server
clusters, the Coherence in-memory data grid, ASM, Oracle Enterprise Linux
and Oracle VM. I interested a lot of attendees in Oracle VM pools with
Enterprise Linux as a future platform for the Grid. I explained the various
Enterprise Manager Packs, especially Configuration Management and

Ever since 11gR2 has been released, it has created a lot of buzz in Oracle Blogosphere with various posts on 11g Release 2 (11gR2 ) New Features primarily ASM New features. I would like to introduce you all to a feature which has been incorporated in 11gR2 Oracle Enterprise Manager to display Real-Time SQL Monitoring information . I would say that this was much awaited feature which had to be implemented in OEM and comes as a handy tool for DBA’s to tune/monitor sql execution.

I worked at a data communications hardware firm many years ago. When I joined the company, I was surprised to learn that the data communications business used (and still uses) a huge arrays of acronyms to describe its technologies. Learning those acronyms was like learning a foreign language. At Oracle, we have built up our share of acronyms over time also. In particular, people have asked over and over about the differences between OAM, OEM, and AMP. Let me try to explain what they are, how they relate to each other, and how they are different.

One of the major enhancements that came in the Hyperion EPM 11 release is the availability of Java APIs to access shared services from external applications. In the prior releases, SDK’s were available but those have been enhanced completely now in this release to accommodate new features. Also with the plans of opening up Essbase in the form of Web Services through a WSDL in future releases, makes the Java API option a definitive plus from an integration standpoint.

First of the PSU (more like a beta) was released on Jul 17th for Oracle DB 10.2.0.4 across specific platforms of Unix. Oracle will release PSUs every quarter (starting with July 2009) along with quarterly CPUs across Databases and Middleware. PSUs will be a superset of CPUs and will have additional recommended patches from Oracle. These set of patches are tested in cohesion.

First patch in the series is patch number : 8576156 applicable on 10.2.0.4 Database. The application of this patch can be identified from the inventory by running - opatch lsinventory.

We just conducted an extremely successful Oracle RAC with Enterprise Manager Grid Control workshop at my company S&I Systems Singapore, jointly with Oracle. For details of this and future workshops, please see:

http://www.si-asia.com/marketing/oracleworkshops2009/

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control is a very versatile environment when you want to
monitor and manager your various Oracle environments.

The main focus of Grid Control lies in the monitoring of the components as they are. The drill
down to the functionality of your software is less obvious. Nevertheless - it is relatively easy to
include some measurements of your web services with Grid Control.

This document shows how to achieve this in a few simple steps.

The Critical Patch Update (CPU) for July 2009 was released on July 14th, 2009. Oracle strongly recommends applying the patches as soon as possible.

More Info:  Supported Products and Components Affected

Includes Patch Advisory also for  Oracle BEA – WebLogic server, JRockit, Oracle Complex Event Processing and WebLogic Event Server

Download the latest one-off patch introducing fixes on Patch Automation feature from Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.5(Patch Number: 8653501)

In the last article, I outlined the key new approaches needed for managing distributed applications and how traditional management tools fall short. This time, I will talk more about why and how to manage distributed applications from the business perspective. In other words, manage them from the top down.

Oracle this week filled a gap in its management platform adding application configuration tools that the company said will help organizations improve app service levels and help apply frameworks for compliance.

The application configuration tools are based on technology Oracle acquired from mValent earlier this year and are being added to the Oracle Enterprise Manager, released in March.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 offers improved reliability and scalability for integrated management of Oracle and third-party products. Justin Kestelyn, editor in chief of Oracle Technology Network (OTN), talked to Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of product development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Leng Leng Tan, vice president of development for applications and systems management for Oracle Enterprise Manager, about the new release. This is an excerpt from the video podcast.

This post covers installation of Oracle Enterprise Management (OEM) Grid Management Agents on Machine which you are planning to monitor using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control.