Release 1.6.0
A63730-01
Library |
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| Oracle
Enterprise Manager Concepts Guide
Release 1.6.0 A63730-01 |
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Oracle Enterprise Manager is a system management tool which
provides an integrated solution for managing your heterogeneous environment.
It combines a graphical console, agents, common services, and tools to
provide an integrated, comprehensive systems management platform for managing
Oracle products.
From the Oracle Enterprise Manager's Console, you can do the following tasks:
This chapter presents an overview of the Oracle Enterprise Manager's benefits and major components.
| Topic | See Page |
|---|---|
This section discusses the major benefits of the Oracle Enterprise Manager. The topics are listed below:
| Topic | See Page |
|---|---|
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Scalability for Growing, Distributed Environments |
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1-4 |
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You can manage your distributed systems and databases from
the Oracle Enterprise Manager Console. The Console gives you a central
point of control for the Oracle environment through an intuitive graphical
user interface (GUI) that provides drag-and-drop system management. The
interface enables an administrator to be effective with minimal training.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager enables you to manage a heterogeneous
environment as easily as a homogeneous one. You can schedule and run jobs
on multiple nodes simultaneously or monitor groups of services together.
Designed to provide the flexibility and customization required
by administrators of rapidly growing distributed environments, the Oracle
Enterprise Manager easily scales upward to maintain performance and automate
routine tasks. Even in a large system you can customize the Console GUI
to display any part of the system.
In a large, distributed database environment, the proportion
of nodes per administrator increases rapidly, requiring tools that can
automate tasks and detect problems on multiple nodes and databases. Oracle
Enterprise Manager offers "lights out" (automated) task management and
proactive event management.
With the Job Scheduling system, you can automate routine
tasks in the network such as backing up databases or running reports on
a regular basis. Jobs can be scheduled to run on remote sites, providing
the kind of "lights out" management that is vital in a large, distributed
environment.
Using the Event Management system, you can remotely monitor
for critical database and system events. The events of interest are pre-registered
by the administrator; and when one of these events occurs, it is detected
and represented graphically on the Console. You can also choose to be notified
through electronic mail or page.
Oracle Enterprise Manager can also automate problem correction.
When registering an event, you can specify that a task be performed in
response to the event. For example, you can register an event for the monitoring
of space usage in a tablespace, and also register a fixit job which
would automatically allocate a new datafile to the tablespace whenever
the event occurs. Proactive management of an event ensures that a problem
is corrected before it noticeably impacts end-users.
Note: See Chapter 3,
"Job and Event Systems" for more information on jobs and event sets.
For detailed information, refer to Chapter 4, "Job Scheduling," and Chapter
5, "Event Management," of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's
Guide.
With Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can localize database
administration (DBA) task execution so that tasks are completed even when
a crucial part of the network is down. Localized tasks are dependable since
all job processing is performed by Intelligent Agents which reside on managed
nodes in the network.
For example, if you schedule a job on a node, the job is
executed locally at the specified time. Since it is executed locally, the
job runs even if a network outage occurs between the node and the Console.
The messages are saved until they can be delivered, even if a network connection
is down.
Note: For information on the Intelligent Agents, refer
to Chapter 6, "Agents and Communication Daemon," of the Oracle Enterprise
Manager Administrator's Guide.
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides easy-to-use administrator-level
security. Each administrator's privileges are stored in a credentials file
and are used by the Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage your connections.
When you connect to a database from the Console, your credentials are transparently
passed on by Oracle Enterprise Manager; therefore, you do not have to log
in repeatedly.
The security management is flexible enough so that you can
change it to suit the security roles and policies of the system. Your preferred
credentials for nodes and services can be stored throughout the network.
Because a separate list is stored for each administrator, you can share
credentials or have unique ones.
Oracle Enterprise Manager's client/server architecture consists
of a centralized Console, common services, and Intelligent Agents running
on the managed nodes. Various applications reside on top of the common
services, performing comprehensive system management tasks.
This section describes the following components of Oracle Enterprise Manager:
| Topic | See Page |
|---|---|
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Console is a graphical user
interface that provides menus, toolbars, launch palettes, and the framework
to allow access to Oracle tools, plus utilities available through other
vendors. The format of the Console screen and the number of applications
are determined by user preferences and the products purchased. See Figure
1-1, "Oracle Enterprise Manager Console," for an illustration of a Console
screen.
The Console's interface consists of the Navigator, Map, Job,
and Event windows. The Navigator discovers and displays a tree list of
all the objects in a network, providing a direct view of databases, user-defined
groups, listeners, nodes, plus the objects that they contain. The Navigator
shows all the objects in the network with their relationships to other
objects.
The Map system allows you to monitor network objects at a
glance. With the Map system, you can create, save, modify, and recall views
of the network. To set up the various groups for monitoring, you simply
drag and drop objects from the Navigator into the Map view.
The Console menu bar provides access to the Navigator, Map,
Job, Event, and DBA applications. You can also use toolbars and tool palettes
to access the applications.
Note: See Chapter 2,
"The Console" for descriptions of the basic components and how they
are organized. For information on the Console menus, see the Oracle
Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide, Chapter 1.
Oracle Enterprise Manager has a set of common services that help you manage nodes throughout your network. This section describes the Oracle Enterprise Manager common services:
| Topic | See Page |
|---|---|
The Job Scheduling system allows you to manage job scheduling
and execution among the databases, groups, listeners, and nodes that you
are administering.
With the Job Scheduling system, you can schedule and run
jobs on remote sites throughout the network. Jobs can be scheduled at various
times, such as daily or weekly, and at single or multiple destinations.
For example, you can schedule a report to be run every Sunday
night on a predetermined set of databases; and you only have to schedule
the job once. Oracle Enterprise Manager ensures that the job is run on
schedule on all specified databases, and it keeps a history of the job
and record of the job's status.
The Event Management system allows you to track and display
the status of events occurring on the databases, groups, listeners, and
nodes in your network system.
When a registered event occurs and is detected, it is represented
graphically on the Console. In addition, you can choose to be notified
through electronic mail or page. The Oracle Enterprise Manager Console
provides support for paging and email when a registered event is encountered.
The Console currently supports alphanumeric paging systems that use the
TAP (Telocator Alphanumeric Paging) protocol for automatic paging and both
SMTP and MAPI for email notification.
You can also automate the correction of system problems by
creating fixit jobs that you specify to be run in response to particular
events.
Note: See Chapter 3,
"Job and Event Systems" for information on how these systems execute
jobs and monitor events. For information on the Job and Event menus, see
the Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide, Chapters 4
and 5.
Each Oracle Enterprise Manager administrator is associated
with a specific repository (a set of tables in an Oracle database) where
any information related to the tasks performed by the administrator is
stored.
A repository provides a central location for storing information
about the state of the environment managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager
from the perspective of each Console user. It contains information on configurations,
jobs and events, historical collections, tuning recommendations, the preferred
credentials for each user, and other information associated with each Oracle
Enterprise Manager Console log-in.
The repository tables can be installed in any database accessible
to the Console, and you can log on to the database where your repository
resides from any network machine. Also, the repositories for the administrators
do not have to be in the same database.
Oracle Enterprise Manager uses Intelligent Agents and a communication
daemon to manage remote tasks such as scheduling and running remote jobs
and monitoring events on remote sites.
Intelligent Agents are processes that run on remote nodes
in the network and execute jobs and monitor user-defined events sent by
the Console via the communication daemon. Intelligent Agents are also used
to discover services on the nodes where they reside.
Each Console has a communication daemon that communicates
with the Intelligent Agents. For instance, when a registered event occurs
on a managed service, the Intelligent Agent notifies the daemon, which
then updates the Console to reflect the new information.
High availability of the agents is ensured because the agents
function regardless of the status of the Console or network connections.
Intelligent Agents also run independently of the services they manage,
so they can be used to shut down and start up those services.
Note: For information on the Intelligent Agents, refer
to Chapter 6, "Agents and Communication Daemon," in the Oracle Enterprise
Manager Administrator's Guide.
The communication daemon and Intelligent Agents work together
to discover services on the network nodes. When these services are discovered,
they are displayed in the tree view in the Navigator window of the Console.
The manner in which the services are located depends on the version of
the Intelligent Agent that is on the node where the service is being discovered.
Note: For information on the communication daemon,
refer to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide. For
information on using Oracle Network Manager, see the Oracle Network
Manager Administrator's Guide. For information on Oracle Enterprise
Manager configuration files, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Configuration
Guide.
Access to Oracle Services on the network is controlled by
a set of user-defined, preferred credentials for the available nodes and
services. Oracle Enterprise Manager encrypts the user authentication information
in the repository and provides it as part of the connection request from
the Console or Console-launched applications.
Oracle Enterprise Manager includes a set of standard, integrated
database administration applications. These applications are specialized
management tools that can be launched directly from the Console or from
the Oracle Administrator Toolbar.
Note: For an overview of the database tools, refer
to Chapter 4 of this guide, "DBA Applications" or to Chapter 7, "Overview
of the Database Tools," in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's
Guide.
Oracle Enterprise Manager's functionality can be extended
further by adding one or more of the specialized applications found in
three optional system management packs: the Oracle Diagnostics Pack, the
Oracle Tuning Pack, and the Oracle Change Management Pack. Combined with
Oracle Enterprise Manager, these three packs offer a single integrated
solution for monitoring system bottlenecks, optimizing and tuning system
performance, managing system changes, and planning for increases in resource
utilization of your entire information system environment.
Third parties can also write applications that integrate
into the Console and use the available common services. These applications
can be launched directly from the Console.
A command line interface is sometimes necessary or desirable.
Oracle Server Manager provides a conversational line mode. In line mode,
you can explicitly execute DBA commands on a command line.
Note: For more information about using Server Manager
in line mode, refer to Appendix A of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's
Guide.
Oracle Enterprise Manager uses the Microsoft Windows online
help system to provide you with information on windows and dialog boxes
in the Console and database tools. The Help system is context sensitive,
but you can also search through the online help contents or index to find
a particular topic.
Note: For information on the Help menu, refer to the
Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide, Chapter 1.
