Oracle Enterprise Manager


Oracle Enterprise Manager is a set of web-based tools aimed at managing software and hardware produced by Oracle Corporation as well as by some non-Oracle entities.

Releases

Oracle Enterprise Manager includes three releases:

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control, the oldest and arguably the best-known release, aims to manage Oracle databases. It originated as a Java client able to configure and manage databases.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Server Control

also has a web-interface to manage the application server.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control

For managing lots of databases and application servers 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 on Oracle hosted web site called Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange.
System monitoring features include monitoring functionality that supports detection and notification of impending IT problems. It monitors Oracle Database instances, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Application Server Farms and Clusters. OEM Grid Control comes with a set of performance and health metrics that allow monitoring of technology components such as applications, application servers, databases, as well as the back-end components on which they rely, such as hosts, operating systems and storage.
The architecture of the OEM for Grid Control has three distinct components:
  1. the collection agent
  2. the aggregation agent
  3. the repository agent
The OMA runs on the target host and collects information on the hardware, operating system, and applications that run 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 database administrators to view the status of systems and services. The OMR comprises an instance of the Oracle database that stores the data collected by the OMS. Installers can make the OMR highly available or fault-tolerant by running it on an Oracle RAC instance across multiple nodes.
Plug-ins on each of the OMAs can customise or manipulate the data presented by the OEM by extending the data that the OMAs collect. Administrators can customize the analysis of the data with "management packs" to look at specific collections of data to display a system's performance. The release of OEM allows for the design and configuration of custom Plug-ins to monitor any application desired. OMAs collect the data using the custom-built plug-in and transmit the results in XML format back to the OMS, which then stores and analyzes the data as desired. Oracle Enterprise Manager continues to expand its monitoring scope by offering management plug-ins for non-Oracle components, that are both Oracle-developed and developed in partnership by third-party vendors. For example, Plug-ins for Veritas Storage Foundation, VMWare vSphere, and EMC Clariion are available.
Key features of OEM Grid Control:
This is Oracle's release since 13c

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. By default, upon installation, the OMA enables several packs without any regard to what a customer has licensed. Users need to de-select unlicensed packs after installing the agent on a target database.

Implementation

OEM uses by default the SYSMAN schema in an Oracle database as a super-administrator account/repository. Utility programs such as emctl or emdctl carry out actual functions. OEM also provides a command-line alternative, EMCLI with verbs to provide the same functionality as the UI-based EM.

Version history