Overview

Oracle Application Management Pack For Oracle Utilities

OR ACLE WHITE P APER | J ANU ARY 2016
Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 1

Overview 1

Oracle Enterprise Manager Architecture 2

Key Features 3

Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities 5

Overview 5

Discovery 5

Support for Clustered and Non-Clustered Environments 9

Support for Native or Embedded Installations 9

Support for new Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.2.0 and above

features 10

Availability Metrics 10

Operating the Environment 11

Cloning the Environment 11

Patch Import 12

Application of Patches 13

Migration of Patches 14

Comparing Configuration Changes 14

Online Metrics 15

Batch Metrics and Management 16

Java Metrics Tracking 16

Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 Service Dashboard Support 17

Pack Usage Guidelines 17

Upgrading from previous versions of the Packs 17

Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Introduction
The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities is a management pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager
to centrally monitor and manage Oracle Utilities products. This whitepaper outlines the capabilities of the pack as
well as the integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities supports the following products:

• Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing V2.2 and above

• Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management V2.x and above

• Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management V2.x and above

• Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway V2.x and above (all editions)

• Oracle Operational Device Management V2.x and above

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

Note: This section is only a basic summary of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. For further details on
Oracle Enterprise Manager it is suggested to refer to http://www.oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-
manager/index.html.

Note: This whitepaper applies to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.1.x. and above only.

Overview
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (aka Oracle Enterprise Manager) is system management software that
delivers centralized monitoring, administration, and life-cycle management functionality for the complete IT
infrastructure, including systems running Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.

Your infrastructure may comprise multiple Oracle Databases, Oracle WebLogic Servers, Web applications deployed
on these servers, hosts running these targets, and so on. You can, of course, use the individual product consoles to
monitor the status of each of these targets, but it becomes cumbersome to shuttle between multiple console
windows and track the performance of each of these targets using so many windows.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control offers a solution that allows you to monitor and manage the complete
Oracle IT infrastructure from a single console (see Figure 1). In addition, it provides support for business-driven IT
management and business-centric top-down application management to manage your business services, user
experience, and infrastructure. It also offers support for monitoring certain non-Oracle products, for example, IBM
WebSphere Application Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and so on.

With a broad set of end-to-end monitoring, administration, configuration management, provisioning, and security
capabilities, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control reduces the cost and complexity of managing such grid computing
environments. Robust service-level management functionality within Enterprise Manager Cloud Control dramatically
improves service levels through robust transaction and end-user performance monitoring and deep diagnostics for
multi-tier Internet applications.

1 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 Fusion Apps Oracle Enterprise Manager App Oracle
Application and Services Control Mgmt Utilities
Included components and features: Packs Pack
• Central Console FMW Cloud
Middleware FMW Control • Repository and Infrastructure Mgmt Pack for
Packs MW

Application Quality Mgmt Pack

Storage and Network

• Discovery
• Grouping Cloud
Database DB Control
• Security Framework
DB Mgmt
Packs
Pack for

Third Party Packs

DB

Cloud Control
• Job Scheduling
Operating System Ops Center • Real Time Availability and
Monitoring

Cloud Infrastructure
• Target Home Pages

Management
Virtualization Ops Center • Administration
• Console Alerts
• Incident Management
Firmware Ops Center • Storage Management
• Host Management
• Virtualization Management
Hardware Ops Center
• Cloud Management

Base Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Packs

Figure 1 – Overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager

Oracle Enterprise Manager Architecture

Although Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is viewed as a single entity, technically, it is built with the following
components:

• Oracle Management Agent - The Management Agent is an integral software component that is deployed
on each monitored host. It is responsible for monitoring all the targets running on those hosts,
communicating that information to the middle-tier Oracle Management Service, and managing and
maintaining the hosts and its targets.

• Oracle Management Service (OMS) - The OMS is a Web-based application that orchestrates with the
Management Agents and the Management Plug-ins to discover targets, monitor and manage them, and
store the collected information in a repository for future reference and analysis. The OMS also renders the
user interface for Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. The OMS is deployed to the Oracle Middleware
Home (middleware home), which is the parent directory that has the Oracle WebLogic Server home, the
OMS home, the Management Agent home, the plug-in home, the Java Development Kit (JDK), the OMS
instance base directory, the Oracle WT directory, the Oracle Common directory, and other relevant
configuration files and directories. While deploying the OMS, the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control
Installation Wizard installs Oracle WebLogic Server if it does not already exist in your environment. As a
result, a WebLogic Server admin console is also installed.

• Oracle Management Repository - The Management Repository is a storage location where all the
information collected by the Management Agent gets stored. It consists of objects such as database jobs,
packages, procedures, views, and table spaces. Technically, the OMS uploads the monitoring data it
receives from the Management Agents to the Management Repository. The Management Repository then
organizes the data so that it can be retrieved by the OMS and displayed in the Enterprise Manager Cloud
Control console. Since data is stored in the Management Repository, it can be shared between any
number of administrators accessing the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. At the time of installation, the
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Installation Wizard configures the Management Repository in your
existing, certified database. The wizard, however, does not install a new database.

• Oracle Management Plug-ins - Plug-ins (also known as Management Packs) are pluggable entities that
offer special management capabilities customized to suit specific target types or solution areas. Unlike the
earlier releases of Enterprise Manager, in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, the plug-ins works in

2 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 conjunction with the OMS and the Management Agent to monitor every target in your environment.
Therefore, they are deployed to the OMS as well as the Management Agent. In the earlier releases, plug-
ins were primarily meant for monitoring third-party targets, but in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, plug-
ins are meant for monitoring all types of targets in your environment. Plug-ins have independent release
cycles, so every time you have a new version of an Oracle product released, you will have a new version
of the plug-in released to support monitoring of that new product version in Enterprise Manager Cloud
Control. This simplifies things because you no longer have to wait to upgrade your Enterprise Manager
system to support a new product version; instead you can upgrade your plug-ins to monitor the new
product version.

• Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Console - The Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console is the
user interface you see after you install Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. With the help of the console,
you can monitor and administer your entire computing environment from one location on the network. All
the systems and services including enterprise application systems, databases, hosts, middleware
application servers, listeners, and so on, are easily managed from one central location.

The relationship between the components is illustrated below:

Plug-In
Plug-In Plug-In
Plug-In
Plug-In

Management Management Management

Agent Agent Agent

Load Balancer

OMS OMS

Cloud Control Console

EM Repository

Figure 2 – Architecture of Oracle Enterprise Manager

Note: In the above figure, the load balancer and the multiple OMSes are depicted only to indicate how a sample
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control architecture would look in a large organization. They are not a prerequisite or a
requirement for an Enterprise Manager system installation. If you do not have a load balancer, then the
Management Agents communicate directly with the OMSes.

Key Features

3 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Before discussing the specifics of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities product, Oracle
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control contains a number of key features that can be exploited by the pack to provide IT
groups with a comprehensive management and operations solution.

The key features of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control are:

• Incident Management – Whenever an event, such when a configurable tolerance is reached, an incident
can be created to register the issue with the site IT department. Incident Manager enables you to assign
incidents to specific personnel, thus distributing the workload among the administrators. You can also
prioritize, escalate, and track incidents through various states of resolution. If you are the person working
the incidents and problems, you can acknowledge that you are working the incidents and problems, and
provide information to the user community regarding the progress of the resolution. You can directly
access My Oracle Support from Incident Manager.

• Environment Management – Installations of technology needs management of its availability and Oracle
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control allows for the tracking of individual environments with alerting on
unscheduled unavailability for resolution. Scheduling of blackout periods for maintenance is also
supported.

• Group Management – Whilst technology can be managed as an individual entity it is also possible to
group technology by a variety of criteria to enable individual administrators track and manage multiple
technologies in a single set of operations.

• Job Scheduling – All tasks and procedures in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can be initiated
immediately or scheduled for a specific date and time. When a task or procedure is complete it can be
reused for scheduling purposes to optimize use. Tasks and Procedures from various technologies can be
combined into a multi-task job to automate more complex setups.

• Console Alerts – Incident and alert rules can be configured to detect issues as they occur reactively or to
anticipate issues before they adversely affect the technology tracked. This alerting can interface directly to
pagers, SMS, email and other notification systems and interact with the Incident Manager to automatically
create incidents.

• Compliance Management – Rules provided with the technologies can be enforced using compliance
checking built into Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to detect common issues. The outcome of
non-compliance can result in an alert or the creation an appropriate incident.

• Configuration Management – One of the challenges of IT is to track changes applied to critical

configuration settings. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control tracks changes to critical configuration
files, regardless of the origin of the change, and allow comparison between versions to show differences.

• JVM Diagnosis – The JVM Diagnostics (JVMD) component, integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Cloud Control, can be used by administrators to diagnose performance problems in java applications. This
can reduce the need to recreate problems before resolving them by isolating the exact area of
performance issues.

• Security Framework – Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control contains a comprehensive security
infrastructure to control the personnel who access the console to the tasks and operations they can
perform. Credentials for operations can be stored and controlled centrally and applied to individual tasks
as needed. Authentication to the console can also be configured to use a wide range of security schemes
to suit your sites needs.

4 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

For more details of each of the features refer to http://www.oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-manager/index.html

Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities has been introduced to allow products using the
Oracle Utilities Application Framework the ability to be operated and managed from Oracle Enterprise Manager
Cloud Control.

Note: The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities requires Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud
Control 12c to operate. The pack will not work on previous versions of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Note: The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities requires the Oracle WebLogic related targets to
be discovered prior to discovering Oracle Utilities targets. The targets for this pack must be registered prior to
registering the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities targets.

Note: All the features described below assume that Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has been installed on
the centralized management server and the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities has been
installed on the target machines to be managed. Refer to the installation documentation on how to achieve this.

Overview
The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities product provides management capabilities building on
the facilities available in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework and the capabilities of Oracle Enterprise
Manager. The focus of the pack is to provide IT Operations people the necessary tools to manage, monitor and
track Oracle Utilities Applications in a number of key areas:

• Software Lifecycle Management - Managing the software components of the products from installation
to decommission including maintaining patches and upgrades.

• Configuration Management - Managing the configuration of each component including compliance

checking.

• Application Performance Management - Monitoring and managing metrics for each component
including performance tracking and availability tracking. This also links to Oracle Enterprise Managers
diagnostic and incident management capabilities.

• Service Level Management - Taking the metrics from the components to set and track service level
targets for individual components or key transactions.

Discovery
The first functionality provided by the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities is the ability to
discover the products from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. When a product is installed it is not initially
managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. To be managed by the console, it must be recognized and
registered within Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control as targets.

The latest version of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities supports the following features in
the discovery process:

5 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Each component of the product is registered individually as part of the discovery process. Each component of the
architecture is assigned to an appropriate Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities target 1:

• Oracle Utilities Home - Each software installation is detected and registered for cloning, application of
patches and upgrades. For example:

Figure 3 – Example default Oracle Utilities Home target home page

• Oracle Utilities Web Application - Each Web Application Server component is registered for online user
tracking and management. When the Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition pack is also installed then this
target is associated with Web Application targets as well. For example:

Figure 4 – Example default Oracle Utilities Web Application target home page

• Oracle Utilities Web Services - Each Business Application Server component is registered for online
performance and MDB/EJB tracking. When the Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition pack is also installed
then this target is associated with Web Application targets as well. For example:

1 Inbound Web Services targets are not part of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities targets. They are covered by base targets.

6 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 Figure 5 – Example default Oracle Utilities Web Application target home page

• Oracle Utilities Batch Server - Each batch component in the batch cluster 2 is registered. Connection to
any Batch Server in the architecture allows management of all batch servers across and environment. For
example:

Figure 6 – Example default Oracle Utilities Batch Server target home page

To relate the above targets an Oracle Utilities Environment target is created to relate all targets for the same
environment. This target type is an amalgam of all the related target types across hosts or within a host. For
example:

2 One Batch Server per environment per host is registered.

7 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Figure 7 – Example Oracle Utilities Environment target home page with related targets

As with all targets in Oracle Enterprise Manager, after the discovery process, individual target definitions can be
edited to include additional meta-data such as owner, implementation stage, cost center etc. For example:

Figure 8 – Example properties target properties

If other packs are installed, target types from these packs may be automatically or manually associated with Oracle
Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities targets. This allows a complete topology to be documented. For
example:

8 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Figure 9 –Example Oracle Utilities Environment topology with related targets

Whilst the discovery process implies that this is a once-off activity this is not correct, promoted target are refreshed
each discovery iteration to update internal metadata used by Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. For
example, configuration file changes are detected at refresh time.

Support for Clustered and Non-Clustered Environments

One of the high availability features of the Oracle Utilities products is to implement clustering within the J2EE
Application Server. This feature implements multiple servers across host machines managed as a cluster. The
Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities recognizes clustered and non-clustered environments 3 as
individual component targets but grouped under a single Oracle Utilities Home target. The cluster operations are
automatically recognized and managed by the tasks assigned to the Oracle Utilities targets.

Note: There is no target type within Oracle Enterprise Manager that handles clusters directly. Clusters are typically
managed by the Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition pack or Non-Oracle Middleware pack.

Support for Native or Embedded Installations

Note: This functionality only related to Oracle WebLogic installations.

In past releases of Oracle Utilities Application Framework the default installation standard uses the product itself to
house key Oracle WebLogic configuration files within the product and configure the Oracle WebLogic installation to
use those files. This is known as an embedded installation as Oracle WebLogic is only used as runtime with
configuration embedded within the product itself. This installation method is ideal for non-production environments
as it is simple and preconfigured.

Unfortunately, due to its preconfigured nature, the embedded installation limits the facilities that implementations can
use within Oracle WebLogic which is not ideal for more complex configurations such as production (or production
like environments). To address this limitation, the Oracle Utilities Application Framework supports a native
installation method.

3 This includes single server environments or environments using Managed Servers.

9 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

The native installation method, outlined in Native Installation for Oracle Utilities Application Framework (Doc Id:
1544969.1) available from My Oracle Support, allows implementations to deploy the product within the Oracle
WebLogic domain directly. This has a number of key advantages:

• All the facilities within Oracle WebLogic can be used and configured from Oracle Enterprise Manager or
the Oracle WebLogic console. These facilities are retained across upgrades. Facilities such as clustering,
JDBC connection pools (including Gridlink), advanced security setups, advanced JMS etc are all
supported.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager can auto discover native installations for registration of Oracle WebLogic
Enterprise Edition pack targets 4.

• Native Installations can be deployed and managed using either Oracle Application Management Pack for
Oracle Utilities targets, Oracle WebLogic console or Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition targets.
Embedded installations can only be managed by the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle
Utilities.

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities supports both embedded and native installations.

For more information about native installations refer to Native Installation for Oracle Utilities Application Framework
(Doc Id: 1544969.1) available from My Oracle Support.

Support for new Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.2.0 and above features
The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities supports the latest released version of the Oracle
Utilities Application Framework such as:

• Support for keystore encryption used by the Oracle Utilities Application Framework.

• Support for Inbound Web Services 5 including metrics.

• Support for additional configuration parameters introduced in the latest version such as CLIENT-CERT
support.

Availability Metrics
One of the most common metrics to track for a product environment is availability. The availability metric needs to
be tracked continuously to detect unintentional outages. The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle
Utilities provides access to check the availability to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to track this metric for
each Oracle Utilities target. The availability tracking facilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control are
populated with availability data from the agents running Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities.
The interactions are described as follows:

• The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities registers the state of the product managed
including the Web Application Server, Database Server and Batch components installed on a polling basis
scheduled by Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control stores and uses the availability statistics to provide tracking of
outages and statistics related to the availability of the individual targets.

4
Embedded installations can also discover Oracle WebLogic targets but this has to be done manually using the techniques outlined in the
documentation.
5
XAI is not supported with dedicated content in the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities. This is managed as a servlet
only.

10 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 • If there is an unintended outage, an alert/incident can be optionally raised tracking the time of the outage.
Diagnosis of the outage can also proceed within Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control within Incident
Manager to track the components that may have caused the outage.

Figure 10 –Example incident tracking

Operating the Environment

Note: In the current release of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities, IBM WebSphere is not
supported for this functionality.

Whilst starting and stopping a product environment can be achieved manually or through the Web Application
Server console, the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities allows an administrator to initiate the
start or stop of an environment from the home page of the environment.

Note: Customers using the Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition Pack can also start Oracle Utilities targets using that
pack as well if a native installation is used. Refer to the Native Installation Oracle Utilities Application Framework
(Doc Id: 1544969.1) whitepaper available from My Oracle Support for further details.

Note: For Oracle WebLogic customers, the start utility will initiate a call to Oracle WebLogic in asynchronous mode.
This will mean the initiation may complete before the actual startup sequence is completed. Status of the startup can
be optionally tracked using Viewing Log Files.

Cloning the Environment

Note: Due to licensing restrictions, cloning is only supported within the same physical machine at the present time.

Once a product environment has been created and patched to the desired level, it is possible to make a copy of that
environment for use in other aspects of an implementation or support. For example, you may have just completed
testing and need to create a training environment on the same machine based upon the testing environment.

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities allows for two types of cloning activities:

• Simple Cloning – This facility specifies the minimal parameters for the target environment for the cloning
process. This facility is handy for quick backup of environments for what if scenarios or before applying
patches to an environment as a roll back mechanism.

11 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 Figure 11 – Example Simple Clone

• Advanced Cloning – This facility allows the administrator to change any configuration setting before the
cloning process is applied. This can be used to build a new configuration environment based upon an
existing environment.

Figure 12 – Example Advanced Clone

The cloning process may be scheduled or executed immediately as desired, with the newly created environment not
automatically registered within Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. This allows administrators to use the
cloned environment as temporary or just a place holder for backup purposes.

Note: The cloning facilities within the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities only clones the
software aspects of the solution. Use the database components of Oracle Enterprise Manager or EM Express to
perform the database aspects of the cloning.

Patch Import

12 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

One of the major features of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is its integration to My Oracle Support.
The integration allows the identification and management of patches from My Oracle Support to the site. Sites with
multiple target types can get all their links to their patches via the My Oracle Support.

The integration allows site to select individual patches and download them en-masse to a central location on their
servers. This integration is provided by Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control for all target types.

Note: The current My Oracle Support integration from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control does not support
prerequisite detection. It is recommended to use the facility to download ALL of the available patches to avoid
conflicts.

Once the patches are download they must be prepared for installation, such as uncompressing. The Import Patches
facility allows the patches to be prepared prior to installation. This facility only has to be used once per set of
patches.

Figure 13 – Example Import Patches

Once the Import Patches has completed the patches are ready to be installed on any environment.

Application of Patches
Note: Application of patches is performed against the Oracle Utilities Home target type. This will replicate the
changes across all targets using that particular Oracle Utilities Home target.

Once the Import Patches facility is complete, individual or groups of patches can be applied to the environment.
Using the Install Patches wizard, the administrator chooses the patches to install from the patch installation
download directory with the appropriate credentials to apply the patches. As with other processes described in this
whitepaper, it is possible to schedule the application of patches immediately or at a designated date and time. The
latter is useful for offpeak patching.

13 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

Figure 14 – Example Install Patches

Migration of Patches
Even though sites can use the Install Patches facility to install patches, it can be cumbersome to constantly select
the patches for each individual environment. The Migrate Patches facility addresses this by allowing administrators
to apply the same patches from one environment on another environment. For example, if a test environment has
been patched to an acceptable level and the administrator wishes to apply the same patches on a training
environment can use then Migrate Patches can be used to achieve this quickly. In this case the administrator uses
the test environment as a source and the training as a target environment.

The Migration Patches functionality does the following:

• It compares the installed patches from the source and target and comes up with a list of patches that are
on the source but not the target. This applies to both application server and database server.

• Any patches that are on the target and not on the source are not de-installed, they are retained across
migrations.

• Once the patch list is compiled an Install Patches is initiated on the target environment.

• If the source and target match then the job will not be initiated.

Figure 15 – Example Migrate Patch screen

Comparing Configuration Changes

One of the features of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is the tracking of Configuration changes of the
product. The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities interfaces to the product to provide the

14 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

configuration data for the Configuration Tracking features. This information is tracked and any change is recorded
when it is detected. This can be done on scheduled basis or initiated manually.

Once the Configuration is tracked it can be compared whenever it is changed across multiple versions. The
differences can be exported and reported upon for analysis purposes.

Figure 16 – Example Configuration screen

Online Metrics
Note: This facility is only available for products using Oracle Utilities Application Framework 4.0 and above only.

In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.0 and above a JMX based facility to assemble and track performance
statistics for all online services. The facilities tracks performance statistics for application service, business object,
business service and script calls by the service name and service type. The service type can represent the object
type as well the transaction type (i.e. Add, Change, View, Delete etc) for the service. The latter means that there are
individual statistics for each transaction type per service.

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities exposes this information to Oracle Enterprise Manager
as content on the Oracle Utilities Web Service target as well as metrics that can be used as alerts, incidents, service
levels and on service dashboards.

The Oracle Utilities Web Service target home page supports the following capabilities:

• Current active statistics can be viewed, sorted and monitored directly to ascertain current performance
levels.

• Individual services with service types can me marked as watch services, which allows implementations to
target specific services. This allows Oracle Enterprise Manager to collect ongoing statistics for historical
analysis.

• The performance statistics can be manually refreshed to gather the latest values.

15 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 • The performance statistics can be reset to ensure timeliness of the statistics. For example, the reset can
be scheduled (as a task) to be reset on an hourly (or whatever interval is appropriate) to allow time period
analysis 6.

These metrics are available as content as well as used anywhere where metrics are used within Oracle Enterprise
Manager such as alerts, as part of incidents, in service dashboards as well as customizing zones within home
pages.

Note: For more information about the online JMX performance metrics refer to the Server Administration Guide

Batch Metrics and Management

Note: This facility is only available for products using Oracle Utilities Application Framework 4.0 and above only.

As with the online JMX performance capability, a batch JMX facility was also introduced in Oracle Utilities
Application Framework V4.0 and above. This capability for thread/threadpool management and allows statistics for
active batch jobs and active threadpools to be displayed and reported. The statistics are live statistics and include
timely information that is not available on the batch run tree including actual records processed at the time of the
statistics collection.

This capability is available across any Oracle Utilities Batch Server target and covers all nodes in the Batch cluster
that the Batch server is a member of regardless of which target is used for monitoring. The information is available
from the Oracle Utilities Batch Server target pages and has the following facilities:

• Individual threads for active jobs are displayed with detailed statistics available upon selection.

• Individual threads can be cancelled directly.

• Active threadpools can be monitored and shutdown.

• Data caches can be reset/flushed directly. This allows batch to reload cache upon demand and keep
configuration data fresh (if manual updates are necessary).

Java Metrics Tracking

The JMX based monitoring facility added in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.0 and above, has been
extended to incorporate java base metrics per JVM 7 executing including:

• Class Loading statistics

• Garbage Collection statistics

• Memory statistics

• Operating system statistics 8

• Runtime statistics for information purposes

• Thread statistics

6 Customers familiar with the txrpt facility in Oracle Tuxedo will see similar functionality. That facility was restricted to hourly statistics only. The JMX
facility provided allows for more flexible collection periods.
7 For online these statistics are per server instance, for batch these are per threadpool JVM. Submitter JVM's are also tracked but the JVM statistics are
less relevant for that object type.
8 The Operating system statistics are statistics from the operating system directly used by the Java Virtual Machine.

16 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

These metrics are available as part of the online and batch JMX monitoring capabilities. Refer to the
java.lang.management java base class for details of the individual statistics available.

Service Dashboard Support

One of the major features of Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.1.x and above, is the ability to create custom service
dashboards. This capability allows sites to create dedicated service tracking facilities for specific targets or groups of
targets. This allows specialization of tracking of components or groups of components with custom metrics that are
important to that component. These dashboards can be used for overall racking and as home pages to provide
advanced custom monitoring capabilities.

For more information about Service Dashboards refer to Configuring and Using Services within the Oracle
Enterprise Manager documentation.

Pack Usage Guidelines

Whilst the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities is comprehensive there are a number of
guidelines to take full advantage of the packs features:

• Establish a common patch location for all environments. This can be a shared directory that each
managed host has access to. The environments need both read and write access to this environment as
the installation of patches will create log files in this directory.

• Whilst using the My Oracle Support interface is active when connecting to environment for patch
recommendations, this feature is not enabled to avoid confusion with the Patch functionality provided in
the current release.

• For optimal use of the Patching facilities of the pack, it is recommended to initially use Install Patches to
install patches on an environment to test the patches. Once that has been completed, use the Migrate
Patches to save having to remember to select the same patches. Migrate Patches is more practical for
applying patches that have been verified.

• Customers using Oracle WebLogic should note that the start utility used is asynchronous. This means that
even when the task has returned Success as a completion code the startup is still in fact in progress.
Customers should check the weblogic_current.log for progress or wait until the startup has completed..

Upgrading from previous versions of the Packs

Note: The instructions in this section only apply to customers who have purchased and installed the Oracle
Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities prior to December 2014. For those candidate customers, these
instructions only need to be executed once as part of the upgrade process.

The latest version of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities has been completely rewritten to
support the levels of integration necessary for management of Oracle Utilities products and integration with Oracle
Enterprise Manager. Given this new level of integration and new target model implemented customers of previous
versions of the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities the following process must be followed:

• For customers using Oracle WebLogic, the Oracle WebLogic targets must be discovered prior to
rediscovering Oracle Utilities targets. For customers using IBM WebSphere, it is not recommended to
upgrade at this time.

17 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

 • Remove the existing pack from the OMS and any associated agents. This will avoid any conflicts. If this is
not performed you may have duplicate targets in your setup.

• Install the latest Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities pack from Self Update or
manually installed as outlined in the installation guide.

• Deploy the pack to the OMS and associate relevant agents with the pack (i.e. the same agents as
originally registered).

• Run the Auto-discovery (or manually discover) the targets you want to manage using the pack to re-
establish them in the OMS.

The new pack is now installed and can manage the targets registered.

Frequently Asked Questions

18 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities

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19 | Overview - Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities