Application Management Blog

Rethinking the Role of SARM in 2011

2011-03-21T01:52:00.000-07:00

It is almost 1 a.m., and I am still up trying to finish up a bit of research via the Internet. By chance I came across an article that talks about Siebel Application Response Measurement (SARM). What is the chance for this to happen in the middle of the night? I thought. What's even more amazing is that the author referred to one of my previous posts (thanks, @lex)! Even though I am getting sleepy, I feel compelled to provide a response.

SARM is indeed not used by every Siebel customer even though it should be. In a survey that we conducted at Oracle OpenWorld several years ago, we learned that there were two reasons for administrators to not turn on SARM - 1. it was too hard to understand the data; 2. SARM was perceived to consume too much overhead. There was some truth in #1, but the Siebel Transaction Diagnostic Tool in Application Management Suite for Siebel should have largely solved this problem. Instead of you having to worry about fetching the right set of SARM log files and running SARMquery manually, the tool does it for you, and generates nice graphical reports that help you quickly visualize and understand the performance diagnostic data that SARM captures.

#2 is a bit of a myth though. SARM does consume capacity, but the amount that it consumes is quite reasonable for the critical insights that it provides in order to manage a Siebel application properly. The alternative of not turning on SARM is to have Siebel as a blackbox, which doesn't make it very manageable.

While SARM is useful, there are also other tools that one should use for managing Siebel application performance. I covered this topic in my previous article "A Holistic Approach to Siebel CRM Monitoring" a while back. The reason why SARM should be used in conjunction with other tools is that we have made available several newer complementary technologies that are more suitable for carrying out some of the application performance management tasks since we introduced SARM.

SARM was created in-house at Siebel. At the time, we thought we would use it as an all encompassing framework for both monitoring and diagnostic. However, as in any 1.0 software development project, there was not enough resource to building everything that we wanted, so we had to phase in the capabilities. SARM was first made available in 7.5, and we made subsequent enhancements to the framework in 7.7 and 8.0. In addition to resource limitation, we also had to live with technology limitation. The original intent of supporting the ARM 2.0 interface was to provide an in-memory feed to monitoring tools so that alerts could be sent if application response time fall below service level target. However, because ARM 2.0 API data fields were not wide enough for SARM to pass contextual data such as screen and view names, the usefulness of this interface for real-time monitoring was limited, and it is totally useless for performance diagnostic as the contextual data is critical to troubleshooting the application.

Another shortcoming of SARM is that SARM instrumentation is not available in the Siebel UI client frameworks. Consequently, SARM can only tell you server time, and not the end-to-end transaction request time that end users see. This means that any network related problems are totally invisible to SARM. By the time we tried to address this shortcoming, Siebel was already part of Oracle, and we had a new option available.

This new option was a new technology called Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). It turned out that Siebel was not the only application in which we had to solve the application performance management problem at Oracle. In fact, administrators of Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne all need to monitor application performance. Instead of building something one off for Siebel, we needed something that worked across all those applications, and can be used in the future for Fusion Applications. RUEI fits the bill perfectly.

RUEI, which also is part of Application Management Suite for Siebel, goes beyond what SARM can do in several aspects and is the perfect complement to SARM. First, RUEI does not consume any processing capacity on any of the Siebel web, application and database servers. RUEI uses a network protocol analysis approach of gathering monitoring data, which does not require any software to be installed on the Siebel server boxes, hence it does not interfere with the Siebel application. The original approach that we thought about implementing would require running SARM in the client, and it would only work for the Siebel HI framework. Other approaches that require agents to be statically or dynamically installed on Siebel clients or servers to intercept Siebel end user traffic may also interfere with Siebel operations.

Second, because RUEI uses network protocol analysis, it can measure the end-to-end response time and the volume of network traffic that the Siebel application generates. The information can be used in the initial performance problem triage to decide whether response time problem is caused by the network or the server. Also, because RUEI captures network information, you can often determine the physical location of the user via network address mapping that is built into the tool.

Third, RUEI can measure not only end user response time, but also capture errors that end users see on the user interface. This insight is very important for carrying out tech support as end users may or may not report the errors that they see on their help requests properly. Error statistics may also be used to improve the usability of the application or user training, as repeating occurance of errors may indicate that the user interface is too hard to use, or users simply are not trained properly.

Fourth, RUEI provides much finer grain real-time alerting of Siebel performance issues than is possible via the ARM 2.0 API approach that SARM implements. With RUEI, one could set KPI target on specific Siebel screens, views or applets, and have alerts go off when certain percentage of activities on those objects go above the acceptable service level target.

Finally, RUEI comes with a built-in OLAP database and a very nice set of tools for generating both ad-hoc and pre-defined performance reports. You can even use it to carry out click stream analysis that is typically done with web analytics software to answer questions that business analysts care about. Think of it as a business intelligence tool for understanding end user experience.

If RUEI is so nice, does it mean that SARM is no longer needed? Of course not. RUEI can tell you from a business perspective and end user perspective who the end users are, where they come from, what they tried to do on Siebel and the kind of response time and errors that they received. However, except for network problems, it won't tell you why the application is running slowly. You need SARM for this.

In addition to RUEI, which provides real user monitoring within Application Management Suite for Siebel, the suite also includes tools for synthetic user monitoring, workflow monitoring, Siebel component monitoring, log file monitoring, and configuration change monitoring. More information about the product can be found on this website.

2011 IT New Year Resolutions

2011-01-03T14:55:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year!

A new year brings new hope. While it is still too early to declare victory on economic recovery, it is probably fair to say that the worst of Great Recession is behind us. The question then is “how to position for growth?”

The economic crisis that we have had with us has had significant implications for IT. Cutbacks to budget has reduced available resources for carrying out new projects that are often needed to support business growth, and it is unclear whether those resources will come back quickly. To position for growth, IT has to become more efficient. The mantra of being able to do more with less is more true than ever.

So how can IT become more efficient in 2011? Here are several things to consider:

Be More User Focused

IT exists to support line of businesses to help drive efficiencies and enable new business models. When times are tough, it is even more important for IT to serve its users well and become even more indispensable. The ability to measure the level of service delivered to end users is critically important, as it would be very difficult to improve IT services without the information. Do you know how your users are using your services? Do you know what kind of experience they get? If not, it is time to find that out so that you can use the information to make improvements. Knowing how your end users use your services and the experience that they get can help you focus your precious resources on things that benefits your business the most. Consider implementing user experience management tools to help you get these insights.

Automate

This one may seem obvious – if there are fewer people to do the job, either you automate or you work longer. The fear, however, is one could get automated out of a job. I am not sure if this is a constructive way to think about things though. People want your service if you add value. The more value you add, the more valuable you become. If you can come up with ways to improve efficiencies, you are adding value. Who wouldn't want you for that? Automation can be done in many ways, with scripting a common approach. However, scripting introduces its own problems. Instead of writing scripts from scratch, consider implementing them on top of packaged tool. By building on top of packaged tool, you can achieve better automation with less effort.

Demonstrate Your Value-Add

As you add value, make sure you document your contributions, preferably in quantifiable ways that are relevant to your end users. IT sometimes get bad rap as problems are highlighted and progress are not communicated effectively. Consider implementing service level management processes so that goals are set, progress is measured, and results are reported clearly. This will help you communicate your success and the value that you add to your organization.

2010 is over, and we get to start things over in 2011. Let's make the most out of it.

Your App, Your Brand

2010-12-18T16:28:00.000-08:00

This past week, I attended OpenWorld in Beijing, China. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet with customers and partners in Greater China and throughout Asia Pacific to discuss the challenges that they face in managing their applications, and the solutions that Oracle provides to solve their problems.

I have been to Beijing several times, so I have gotten to know the airport quite well. Still, I had not visited the Star Alliance lounge hosted by Air China in the newer T3 terminal, so I decided to check it out on my way back. This caused me to get to my boarding gate a bit late. When I got there, I noticed that the plane looked different. It looked like a Continental plane.

Several thoughts came to my mind at that moment:

Did I get to the right gate?
Maybe this is actually a United codeshare flight operated by Continental
Will the seat and the amenities be better or worst since Continental 777s are configured differently from those of United?

After I got on the plane, I found out that it was actually just another United 777 but it was one of the first 3 planes in the fleet to be repainted to the combined United Continental livery, so there was no need to be concerned. Nevertheless, it was interesting to note the effect that the brand identity change had on my expectations of the flight. The rest of the trip was uneventful, and the flight experience was consistent with what I expected to get from the airline.

This brand identity change generated a bit of debate in the past several months, as some United customers and employees lobbied to keep the old United logo. As the above example shows, the brand identity change may cause some minor confusion. However, the brand is more than just the logo. It is the total promise that a company delivers to its customers, and increasingly, this promise is about the experience that is delivered at every touchpoint with the customer. I think this old video from United says it rather nicely. Everything in the video defines the United brand.

You may wonder – what does this topic have to do with application management?

A lot, as it turns out. These days, the United experience is defined not only by the flight services that it provides, or the people that carry them out, but also by the self services applications that are used to provide better services to customers at lower costs. I think the importance of these self service applications in maintaining United's brand is not lost to United's leadership, as it has steadily improved its applications. United's competitors are not standing still either. American, Delta and Southwest have all rolled out improved websites.

One of the key factors in delivering great customer self service experience is good user experience management. It starts with a business-driven definition of user experience, and proactive monitoring in order to understand how end users interact with self services applications and the experience that they receive. At OpenWorld Beijing, one of our customers co-presented with us some really good work that it did to manage its online presence. I will talk about it more in the next article after returning from Christmas vacation.

New Application Management Suites from Oracle

2010-09-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

Oracle OpenWorld is over! It was a busy week filled with presentations, demonstrations, customer meetings, hands-on labs, etc... On the other hand, it was also a relatively quiet week on the news front for Oracle Enterprise Manager, as the 11g version of the product was released only a few months back so there was not a whole lot of new news to talk about. The major news was on the application management front.

New Application Management Suites are available!

These management suites are the results of development efforts that began several years ago with the release of Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft, which was followed by additional Application Management Packs that covered Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle Communications Billing & Revenue Management. To further expand Enterprise Manager's product platform capabilities, we also acquired several emerging companies, including Moniforce for real user monitoring, Auytuma for Java diagnostics, ActiveReasoning for IT compliance management and mValent for configuration management, and the new Application Management Suites added these technologies to provide more complete solutions for managing Oracle Applications.

We have followed three key principles in designing these management suites. First, we offer complete management solutions. Administrators are constantly faced with a wide array of management problems, which require different tools to address. Take diagnostics, for example. Depending on the nature of the application problems, different diagnostic tools are needed to determine problem root cause. Some problems are caused by mis-configurations, which are best solved by performing configuration analysis. Others are caused by inefficient application implementation, in which transaction diagnostic provides the much needed visibility to find the bottlenecks. Some problems may not even be caused by software, as end users may be using the applications improperly, and data collected from real user monitoring tools can help spot this kind of errors much more effectively. Point products only exasperate the problem by giving administrators incomplete set of tools to work with.

Second, we aim to provide integrated user experience for our management tools. Much of the functionality of our Application Management Suites run within Enterprise Manager Grid Control, a highly integrated management platform that is also used to manage everything from Oracle Database to Oracle Fusion Middleware to O/S, virtualization, and storage devices. The integrated capabilities make it easier to deploy and use the management tools. Another aspect of integration is with My Oracle Support. Traditionally, system management tools and vendor support were two completely different domains. Administrators used tools that were deployed on-premise to perform various tasks. When they needed help, they logged on to vendor support website and used a completely different set of tool to work with tech support. This sort of arrangement was highly inefficient. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only management tool on the market that is connected to My Oracle Support, and this integration facilitates a more collaborative approach between customers' IT staff and Oracle support associates to manage Oracle technologies more effectively.

Third, and most important of all, we focus on providing application management tools that are designed specifically for managing Oracle Applications so that they work better out-of-box than 3rd party tools. This is an important distinction, as the IT market is flooded with management tools from vendors large and small. Most management products on the market, however, provide what I call "generic" management tools. They are used to monitor servers, or operating systems, or network devices. They can generate alerts and display data in dashboards. These are rather commoditized technologies. The difference between generic management tools and specialized management solutions that we offer for managing Oracle Applications is that our management suites provide much better visibility of our application artifacts and in-depth capabilities that address the unique management needs of Oracle application products. Features such as Siebel Workflow Process Monitoring, PeopleSoft Domain Administration and Oracle E-Business Customization and Setup Management are simply not available from major management tool providers. These capabilities were developed by our application experts using the best Oracle Applications insights available in the industry across our development, support and services organizations.

We hope that you find our new management suites compelling. Additional information about these products are available on Oracle Technology Network. Click here for more information.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g is Here!

2010-04-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

We hope that you enjoyed the launch event. If you missed it, you may still watch it via our on demand webcast, which is being produced and will be posted very shortly.

11gR1 is a major release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, and as one would expect from a big release, there are many new capabilities that appeal to a broad set of audience. Before going into the laundry list of new features, let's talk about the key themes for this release to put things in perspective.

First, this release is about Business Driven Application Management. The traditional paradigm of component centric systems management simply cannot satisfy the management needs of modern distributed applications, as they do not provide adequate visibility of whether these applications are truly meeting the service level expectations of the business users. Business Driven Application Management helps IT manage applications according to the needs of the business users so that valuable IT resources can be better focused to help deliver better business results.

To support Business Driven Application Management, 11gR1 builds on the work that we started in 10g to provide better support for user experience management. This capability helps IT better understand how users use applications and the experience that the applications provide so that IT can take actions to help end users get their work done more effectively. In addition, this release also delivers improved business transaction management capabilities to make it faster and easier to understand and troubleshoot transaction problems that impact end user experience.

Second, this release includes strengthened Integrated Application-to-Disk Management. Every component of an application environment, from the application logic to the application server, to database, host machines and storage devices, etc... can affect end user experience. After user experience improvement needs are identified, IT needs tools that can be used do deep dive diagnostics for each of the application environment component, analyze configurations and deploy changes. Enterprise Manager 11gR1 extends coverage of key application environment components to include full support for Oracle Database 11gR2, Exadata V2, and Fusion Middleware 11g. For composite and Java application management, two key pieces of technologies, JVM Diagnostic and Composite Application Monitoring and Modeler, are now fully integrated into Enterprise Manager so there is no need to install and maintain separate tools. In addition, we have delivered the first set of integration between Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Enterprise Manager Ops Center so that hardware level events can be centrally monitored via Grid Control.

Finally, this release delivers Integrated Systems Management and Support for customers of Oracle technologies. Traditionally, systems management tools and tech support were separate silos. When problems occured, administrators used internally deployed tools to try to solve the problems themselves. If they couldn't fix the problems, then they would use some sort of support website to get help from the vendor's support staff. Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g integrates problem diagnostic and remediation workflow. Administrators can use Oracle Enterprise Manager's various diagnostic tools to begin the troubleshooting process. They can also use the integrated access to My Oracle Support to look up solutions and download software patches. If further help is needed, administrators can open service requests from right within Oracle Enterprise Manager and track status update. Oracle's support staff, using Enterprise Manager's configuration management capabilities, can collect important configuration information about customer environments in order to expedite problem resolution. This tight integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager and My Oracle Support helps Oracle customers achieve a Superior Ownership Experience for their Oracle products.

So there you have it. This is a brief 50,000 feet overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. We know you are hungry for the details. We are going to write about it in the coming days and weeks. There will also be additional webcasts and seminars worldwide in the coming months. For those of you that absolutely can't wait to find out more, you may download our software to try it out today. In fact, for the first time ever, the initial release of Oracle Enterprise Manager is available for both 32 and 64 bit Linux. Additional O/S ports will arrive in the coming weeks, and will be announced on the Oracle Enterprise Manager blog.

The Next Generation of Oracle Enterprise Manager Will Arrive in 7 Days!

2010-04-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Seven more days to go before we launch Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

We invite you to join us for this exciting announcement. You may attend the event in person if you are going to be in New York City next Thursday (4/22) or over the web via our webcast. We will also be hosting a live simulcast event at the Collaborate conference in Las Vegas.

Click the links below to learn more about event agenda and to register.

Click here to register for the live event in New York City.

Click here to register for the webcast.

The simulcast event at Collaborate will be held in Palm B room on Level 3 of Mandalay Bay Convention Center starting at 9:45 a.m. local time.

Oracle to Acquire AmberPoint

2010-02-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

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. :-) AmberPoint, along with Sun Ops Center, will add to Oracle's capabilities in delivering application-to-disk management to customers.

Click here for the official press release about this acquisition.

Want to Have a Smooth Running Application? Architect Your Tools Deliberately

2010-02-04T23:18:00.000-08:00

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. This is very different from other complex engineering endeavors such as automotive and aerospace design, in which far more thoughts are put into the dashboards and the avionics. Using the right set of tools and implementing the tools properly are important to successful application projects.

Several deliberate decisions need to be made in tool selection for managing applications. The first one is whether to build home grown tools or buy packaged products. Some people prefer to build their own tools, but it is a difficult effort to sustain in the long run. Developing tools is like developing any software. To do it properly, they need to be properly designed, implemented, tested and maintained over time, which get expensive. Instead of building tools from scratch, most organizations opt to reuse something that they already have, which in many cases are generic management tools that were originally designed to manage servers or networks. The problem here is that a fair amount of effort is still needed to adapt these tools to manage applications, and they always provide only generic functionalities that do not address the real needs of managing applications. A better thing to do is to use tools that are designed specifically for the job of managing specific applications, while maintaining a balance of avoiding tool proliferation. I wrote about the topic of tool selection in greater depth in article last year. Click here if you want the details.

Besides getting the application management tools, it it important to design the tools to be an integral part of the runtime environment and allocate capacity to run them. Many people treat tools as an overhead. If you go by the definition that tools do not perform any actual processing of business transactions, then it is indeed an overhead. However, tools form a critical part of an application infrastructure. Without tools and the instrumentation to collect management data, the application becomes a black box that cannot be managed. No one would design an aircraft without proper avionics, and the same thing should apply to tools also.

Another set of decisions are related to the deployment architecture of the tools. The architecture needs to be designed deliberately with a similar level of care taken to design the deployment architecture of the applications, especially if the tool will be used to manage a complex application environment. In fact, there are similarities in designing tools deployment architecture and application deployment architecture. For example, one has to decide between centralized single instance tool deployment vs. multi-instance deployment of tools such as Oracle Enterprise Manager, just like one has to decide how many production application instances to deploy. This sort of decision is highly environment specific.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, by building on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, allows the tool to scale both horizontally and vertically. Therefore, from a technical perspective, a single instance of Oracle Enterprise Manager can scale to manage thousands of applications, database, and servers targets spanning development, testing and production environments. However, some organizations may still want to deploy multiple instances so that different units within the organizations can maintain control over their own instances of Enterprise Manager in order to maximize control and flexibility. Others may want total separation between Enterprise Manager instances used to manage pre-production vs. production environments in order to maximize security. The final decision needs to be made based on not only technical factors, but also organization and other considerations.
Whether you are going to have a single or multi-instance Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control deployment, you still need to make sure that you set up at least one separate test instance of the tool. Before you roll a version of Oracle Enterprise Manager into production use, for example, you should have it tested in order to minimize any surprise.

Another potential decision is to decide whether high availability (HA) deployment is needed for the tools. Just like a pilot cannot fly with non-working avionics, it is virtually impossible for administrators to manage their applications effectively if the tools are not available. Some management tools support high availability deployment. For example, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control servers, known as Oracle Management Service (OMS), can be set up to run in a clustered configuration or even a multi-site clustered configuration. The underlying Oracle Database repository can be made highly available by leveraging Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) and data guard technologies. More information about HA Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control implementation is spelled out in Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture guidelines.

Related Articles

- Want to Have Smooth Running Applications? Start with Good Planning.
- Building Application Management into Your Capacity Plan
- People, Process, Technology – The Right Tool

New Releases of Application Management Pack and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Available

2010-01-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

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.

These two management packs address many feedbacks that we have heard from our customers. After we launched the original version of the E-Business Suite Management Pack about two years ago, we went to present the product to many user group meetings and tradeshows to promote the product. In the Q&A sessions that followed our presentations, several questions tend to come up over and over. From the questions, we learned that while people were generally pleased to see the new management pack, there were clearly some unmet needs in the original version of the product. These needs included:
- Support for “hot cloning” such that E-Business Suite could stay running while cloning is carried out
- Patching Automation to apply E-Business Suite patches
- Automated Migration for E-Business Suite functional artifacts
- Transaction Diagnostic to identify transaction bottlenecks

We have been hard at work to address these needs ever since. Some of these requirements were met when we released Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, which covers customization, setup and patch management, last May. However, with the release of that pack came a new requirement: change approval process support.

The new versions of Application Management and Application Change Management Pack finally address all these needs that we have been hearing from our customers. Key improvements include:

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite
• Smart Clone: Smart Clone enables E-Business Suite systems to staying running while being cloned, and it provides flexibility for administrators to incorporate their own custom DB cloning techniques into pack's clone routine. Some of the key cloning scenarios supported include: RAC to RAC, RAC to Non-RAC, and scale down (Multi Node to Single Node).
• Concurrent Processing Dashboard: Administrators now have the ability to monitor and manage Concurrent Managers and Concurrent Programs through a intuitive dashboard. The new dashboard provides a detailed overview on the efficiency of Concurrent Managers in processing concurrent request. Administrators also have the ability to keep a watch list of specific concurrent managers and specific concurrent programs.
• End to End Tracing: Administrators can now analyze Oracle E-Business Suite's database load from Application Management Pack. Also the administrators have the ability to search Application Web User Sessions all the way down to Database Sessions. Top DB sessions can also be traced back to the Application User.

Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite
• Change Approval Framework: Changes orchestrated through Application Change Management Pack can now be controlled through the new change approval framework. Separate roles can be defined for approvers, who review and approve changes, and administrators, who deploy the changes. Built in notification capability enables approver(s)/requestor to be alerted about the status of relevant change requests, and the change approval records provide a way to maintain an audit trail of changes.
• Integrated Custom Application Management: This feature enables E-Business Suite administrators to easily register new custom applications across Oracle E-Business Suite systems and also track and validate existing custom applications in a standard way.
• Pre-requisite Patch Analysis: Oracle E-Business Suite patches can now be analyzed for pre-requisites prior to deployment in the target system. The analysis also verifies whether the pre-requisites are already met in the target system, and if they are not met, then those patches may be added to the patch job.
• Offline Transformation: This allows administrators to download Oracle E-Business Suite setup data in Microsoft Excel document and use Excel to edit and define new data.

These two management packs form the foundation of an advanced toolset for managing Oracle E-Business Suite. When combined with complementary products such as Oracle Real User Experience Insight and Application Testing Suite, they form a complete solution that cover all aspects of E-Business Suite lifecycle management.

We hope that you find this new management pack release compelling. To learn more about these two packs, go visit our product website. You may also download it from edelivery to try it out.

RUEI 6.0 is Released

2009-12-02T15:12:00.000-08:00

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?
- What sort of response time have they experienced?
- What errors have they encountered?

The insight that RUEI delivers can help application administrators manage application service level better through proactive monitoring and greater insights on end user activities. Besides application administrators, business analysts may also benefit from the insights provided by this tool, as end user activities on the applications can also reveal important information on whether the business is operating as intended. The tool is an indispensable piece of technology for anyone who owns or manages mission critical business applications. It is the next best thing to being there with every single application users and watching what they do on the applications.

The latest version of this tool delivers several important enhancements.

First, it offers integration with Oracle Application Diagnostic for Java and Composite Application Monitor and Modeler, two key pieces of Oracle Enterprise Manager technologies that provide further insights to the internal workings of applications. RUEI helps application administrators find out what the user did, and these two technologies provide further insights on why the applications behave in certain way, so it is nature to integrate them together.

Second, it provides better ways for administrators and business analysts to review user activities with full user session replay on web applications that shows step-by-step interactions between the end users and the applications, and customizable monitoring dashboards that tailor to the information that is most relevant about the monitored applications. These dashboards provide both IT and business users a single view with actionable intelligence, to help identify trends, patterns and anomalies.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, improved out-of-box capabilities to support key Oracle Applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel CRM, as well as applications constructed out of Oracle technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) and Oracle Weblogic Portal. While RUEI is designed to be a general purpose application monitoring tool, we want to make sure that we provide un-paralleled out-of-box support for our customers who depend on our packaged applications and middleware technologies to run their businesses. Customers who use RUEI to monitor their Oracle Applications and middleware can expect shorter time-to-benefit as the tool works better out-of-box, as well as greater insights into Oracle technologies.

More information about RUEI can be found here.

Want to Have a Smooth Running Application? Start with Good Planning.

2009-11-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

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 going to cover what we discussed at the session starting with this blog entry.

To frame the discussion, we decided to organize our material around application lifecycle phases, and based our discussion loosely around Oracle Unified Method, Oracle's implementation methodology for both application and technology products. Oracle Unified Method, as the name implies, is a unified implementation methodology that combined the best practices of the older Oracle Application Implementation Method as well as the methodologies from many acquired companies. The result is a very comprehensive set off best practices that should lead to implementation and operational successes if the methodology is applied properly.

At the earliest phase of an application project, known as the inception phase, there are two sets of activities that need to be done to set the foundation for achieving success later on in production. The first is to control the scope of customizations. Customization is often seen as a controversial topic, and some application vendors even go as far as telling customers to avoid customizations altogether. In our view, some customizations can be justified. One ways that different organizations compete with each other is through process innovation, and process innovation often require application customizations in order to support the processes.

However, bugs and performance problems may also get introduced into customizations alongside new capabilities. Before packaged applications are released to customers, they usually undergo extensive functional and load tests to ensure the proper functioning, stability, performance and scalability of the products. However, once customizations are introduced into these applications, these test results effectively become invalidated, as the actual application is not the same as the version that the vendor tested. In other words, there are potential costs and risks associated with customizations, so they should be made very selectively.

How to be selective?

We have observed the following practices at some of the best run application implementation projects by our customers.

Spend time to really understand the full capabilities of the applications. The whole point of buying a packaged application is to take advantage of the business practices that are baked into the product and leverage the economy of scale of sharing their development costs with other customers. To make intelligent decisions on what to customize, it is important to know what is already in the box.
Analyze the current business processes and adjust them as necessary to fit the application. Customizations are usually done to support specific business process activities. If the out-of-box application does not work the exact way that maps to various business tasks, perhaps it would be easier to change the way that people use the application. Furthermore, simply converting existing inefficient business processes to run in an application usually is not the best way to improve effectiveness.
Make whoever requested for customizations justify the needs. Evaluate the requests against potential costs and risks for approval and prioritization. This process should both be quantitative and qualitative. For example, justify benefits in terms of task step reduction, or even potential incremental revenue affected. For costs, have rough estimates on implementation and testing times. A scoring system, with clearly defined criteria, could also be very useful.

The most important thing is that these activities need to be carried out by the organization's own staff as much as possible, as it can be problematic to rely solely on the advice of outside consultants. While the best consultants would provide sound advice, there are also some bad apples that would encourage customers to over customize because they stand to profit from it.

By controlling the scope of customizations, not only would you make your application implementation more manageable, but you would also increase the chance that your application will run smoothly in production.

New Oracle Enterprise Manager Widgets

2009-10-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Oracle Enterprise Manager is a great tool that helps IT administrators keep tab of the health of their various applications and infrastructure components. Its web browser based user interface can be accessed by administrators anywhere in the world where a browser runs in order to get latest status information on the managed objects (a.k.a. targets) that they want to monitor. However, it can be a bit tedious to have to launch Enterprise Manager console every time just to check status. If this problem applies to you, there is now a solution that should make your job easier.

Introducing Oracle Desktop Widgets, which are lightweight applications that you can run on your PC or Mac to access Enterprise Manager information. Three widgets are available. The first widget lets you keep track of the up/down status of the targets that you care to track.

The second widget allows you to monitor the actual service levels of your service targets.

The third widget is designed specifically to monitor database usage and performance.

One of the key advantages that these widgets provide is the ability to stay connected to Enterprise Manager. You can set them up to be launched automatically every time you log onto your PC, and the widgets stay on your desktop until either you close them explicitly, or when you log off your account.

How much do these widgets cost? They are free! They are released technology previews in order to test out new ideas and concepts. Please try them out, and give us feedbacks. To submit your feedback, click the feedback icon on the upper right corner of the widget.

Distributed Application Management - Rapid Remediation

2009-10-01T15:22:00.000-07:00

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. When it comes to remediation, having to deal with fewer tools is better for you. It helps you reduce MTTR.

Let’s look at deployment automation. A fix may require deploying various kinds of changes to the application environment. These changes may involve deploying new application code, correcting configuration discrepancies, tuning database SQL, or patching the software. Similar to monitoring and diagnostics, the task of applying change to a modern distributed application environment is complicated by dependencies amongst potentially large number of affected components. If changes are not applied uniformly across all the affected components, the application environment may become destabilized. Furthermore, change needs to be applied systematically following a set of well-defined policies in order to preserve availability as well as compliance.

When it is time to applying changes, deployment automation tools can be used to group together related change elements into a single package, and orchestrate the numerous steps involved in bringing down elements of the application environment, moving the package into the proper places, applying the change, and re-activating the application environment. Deployment automation helps reduce human errors in potentially complex change procedures, increase the efficiencies of such operations, and ultimately, lead to lower costs and increased agility for the applications. OK, I don’t like to reuse expressions but not all deployment automation tools where created equal either! Most provide a scripting tool and using it, you can develop highly sophisticated deployments. This is certainly necessary but not sufficient. Deploying an application may involve dozens of individual steps. A great percentage of them could be automated for most deployments. A truly useful deployment tool should have these steps pre-defined for you. Furthermore, with some basic questions, you could address a great deal of customizations. So, we should expect deployment automation tools to actually do the job without requiring IT staff to tell the tool how to do the job. In the e-commerce application example, modified checkout logic and table index update can be deployed together, and the change be recorded for auditing purpose.

Distributed Application Management - End-to-End Management

2009-09-12T13:47:00.000-07:00

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. If one relies on point solutions, troubleshooting will invariably involve a significant degree of context switching, which basically means looking at multiple consoles and having to cut and paste information between them to get to the root-cause, resulting in delayed resolutions and increased stress for administrators. Relying on point solutions also slows down the diagnostics of the actual problem because of the finger-pointing between different organizations. Hence it is very desirable that these tools are integrated to provide a comprehensive view of the performance and availability of the applications and the underlying infrastructure as well as the ability to rapidly diagnose problems when service-levels are violated or are close to being violated.

In troubleshooting, the first step is to isolate the components that may be causing the problem. This task can be greatly simplified through the use of integrated configuration management capabilities and the dependency information from the CMDB. Dependency information stored in the CMDB helps narrow down the list of components that may be contributing to a problem. Once the components are identified, change history information stored in the CMDB can rapidly provide insights on why a previously working component began to malfunction. In the e-commerce application example, the IT staff could use the CMDB to identify the components that are associated with checking out, which would include the checkout logic, the application server and the database. After that, they could search the CMDB for all the associated components for changes that have been made against them to see if any behavior change can be attributed to changes in configuration.

For many kinds of problems, administrators need access to historical data about multiple tiers of computing before the root-cause can be identified. An integrated tool that can correlate end-user response times with middleware and database processing times can save the administrators precious time and effort. Through the recorded performance data, one could visualize the demands that were placed on an application in a given point in time, information on resource consumption and potential contention. In the e-commerce checkout example, the IT staff could retrieve performance data collected from the application, the web server, the application server, the database, and the operating system in order to visualize the behavior of the environment. They may discover that the database server had a very high load because of competing batch workload, which slowed down checkout processing.

Another technology that is useful for troubleshooting performance problem is transaction tracing. In modern distributed application environments, processing of a request frequently involves multiple components, which may or may not even run on the same server machine. Using these transaction tracing tools that are designed specifically for the type of application being analyzed, one could follow through the processing of these requests to find out how much time is spent at each step in order to identify bottlenecks. Recall the management-aware discussion? If your application platform and management tools actually understand each other, you will get better information, more timely information and you will make better decisions. Ask your vendor to demonstrate the depth of the management tool’s ability to learn about your application and database infrastructure. In the e-commerce application example, the IT staff could look up collected trace information about checkout operations starting at the application server mid-tier level, and discover that most of the time was spent in the database. Using tools designed specifically for troubleshooting database, administrators could drill down to the database to analyze SQL statements to look for ways to optimize them, such as rewriting the SQL statements or adjusting table indices.

Picture: Transaction Diagnostic for Siebel CRM

OAM, OEM, AMP - What are the Differences?

2009-08-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

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.

OAM – Oracle Applications Manager is the base console that is shipped with Oracle E-Business Suite

OEM – Oracle Enterprise Manager comes in three editions; Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control, Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Server Control, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. The first two are the base consoles that are shipped with Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server, respectively, and they provide similar kind of functionalities as Oracle Applications Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control is Oracle's flagship management product, providing enterprise class management capabilities and support for ITIL best practices.

AMP – Application Management Pack, specifically Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, is a product that extends and runs on Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control to provide advanced management capabilities specifically for Oracle E-Business Suite.

How is OAM different from OEM/AMP?

OAM is the baseline console that is bundled as part of Oracle E-Business Suite. It is a tool designed primarily for administrative tasks such as configuring E-Business Suite parameters, identifying patches to apply, and looking up the real time status of E-Business components from a single E-Business Suite instance. Conceptually, it is similar to Oracle Database Control, which is another similar administrative utility that Oracle provides for administering a single Oracle database instance.

OEM, specifically the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, provides advanced value added management capabilities for E-Business Suite administrators who need the extra support that only OEM can provide. Through OEM, E-Business Suite administrators can proactively monitor their E-Business Suite environments, track configuration changes, troubleshoot problems, and automate manual intensive tasks such as cloning E-Business Suite environments. Features such as synthetic transaction based monitoring, service level management, configuration analysis, historical metrics, and cloning automation exist only in OEM and not OAM. These value added capabilities help improve the service levels of E-Business Suite applications while at the same time reduce operational costs.

It is not an either-or decision to choose between OAM and OEM. In fact, we designed OEM to complement OAM - OEM is the advanced tool for proactive management and automation, OAM supports basic administrative tasks. Furthermore, because OEM and OAM were built on the same Oracle Fusion Middleware UIX user interface framework and the Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite contains numerous integration points with OAM, E-Business Suite administrators can seamlessly navigate between the two tools to accomplish various tasks.

Distributed Application Management - Managing from the Top Down

2009-07-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Besides the toolkit approach, traditional systems management tools also focused on managing the individual components of standalone applications from the bottom up. The components that made up these applications often ran on a single computer, which may be a mainframe or a large Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) server, and they were accessed via dedicated terminal connections. In contrast, modern distributed business applications run on multiple standards-compliant servers along with a collection of middleware, database, network and storage technologies. These applications are more interconnected and increasingly the interconnections are dynamic which make the end-to-end environment very challenging to manage. Because of the large number of components in modern application environments and the complex dependencies amongst the components, the traditional bottom-up focused approach alone is insufficient as it is very difficult to draw conclusions on the health of an application by simply examining the health of individual components that the application is built on.

The alternate approach is to manage applications top-down. Why is a top-down approach a better solution? In short, it helps IT focus on measurements that are relevant and ensures that applications meet business needs. This approach starts with understanding end-user service level requirements, which may include a service level target, the hours for enforcement, and the key business process flows that the applications must complete successfully. For example, for an e-commerce website, the service level requirement may be 99.99%, or less than 1 hour of unplanned outage in a year. The business hours may mirror the times when customers are expected to use the system, which could be 24x7. The key business operations that must be supported may include browsing product catalogs, placing products on shopping carts and checking out to complete orders.

With the end-user driven service level requirements defined, IT staff may then set up appropriate monitoring to ensure that those requirements are met. Technologies such as end-user monitoring may be employed to measure application end user experience, which eliminate any guesswork to gauge whether the applications are working. In the example above, the IT staff might want to define synthetic transactions using a specially designed tool that is appropriate for the e-commerce application to simulate end users logging onto the website, browsing the catalog, placing items on shopping carts, and checking out. The IT staff may also define thresholds against these end-user measurements so that they can be notified proactively if application performance or availability degrades. In fact, in contrast to traditional systems management, the IT staff may rely primarily on these notifications instead of component level notifications to manage the applications, as notifications from these end-user oriented measurements provide much more accurate views on the health of the applications according to the way that end users see them.

Picture: Business Process Availability Report

Besides end user monitoring, another key enabler for the top-down approach is the mapping of business processes to the underlying components that the applications rely on. These mappings connect the end-user perspective with the underlying technology components, and enable quicker problem isolations and more accurate impact analysis when a problem is detected by end-user monitoring. The technology that facilitates this mapping is the configuration management database (CMDB). The CMDB should be the integrated foundation of any modern application management tool, as it keeps track of not only the list of components that support an application, but also the relationships amongst these components and the changes that are made to them. Not all CMDBs were created equal! Most CMDBs provide facilities for defining new and custom types of Configuration Information (CI) so you can grab CIs that are unknown to the CMDB. This is necessary but not sufficient. A CMDB must come out-of-the-box ready to collect as much about your application environment as the infrastructure they were built on. If you are expecting to have to feed your CMDB specific instructions on how to collect CIs on your business critical applications, you should be prepared to dedicate a significant amount of your administrators’ time for defining and maintaining these CIs.

In the example above, the e-commerce processes may be mapped to the front end load balancer, the firewall, the web server, the application server, the database server, and the network switches and routers that connect everything together.

New Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Pack for SOA and Middleware Management

2009-06-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Enterprise Manager product release parade continues. Oracle just released three new management packs: Management Pack for Oracle WebCenter Suite, Management Pack Plus for SOA and Management Pack for Websphere Portal.

There are several notable things about these packs. First, they are for both Oracle and 3rd party middleware products, continuing our effort to help Oracle customers proactively manage Oracle products and 3rd party technologies often used with Oracle. Second, they leverage the Composite Application Monitoring and Modeler technology that we acquired last year in order to take Enterprise Manager's ability to discover, model, monitor, diagnose and report on the usage of various Java EE and SOA applications and the artifacts that make up these applications.

Additional product information can be found at this website.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/soa_mgmt.html

There is also a very nice recorded demo that shows how the tool works in action, which you may access from this link.
http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/screenwatches/camm/index.html

Distributed Application Management - New Challenges, New Approaches

2009-05-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote about the differences between application management and traditional system management. In this new series, I am going to examine the new challenges presented by managing distributed applications further, and talk about the new approaches needed to address these needs. These new approaches include:

- Integrated management solutions that are designed specifically for managing applications in order to achieve the quickest return on investments
- Application platforms that are management-aware
- Ability to map and track application service levels to actual business processes and flows so that applications’ compliance to business requirements can be assessed more easily and accurately
- End-to-end performance monitoring, diagnostics and root-cause analysis across the broad application environment and its underlying technology stack to account for all the elements that affect application service levels
- Rapid remediation of issues regardless of where they occur in the entire technology stack

The problem with traditional system management approaches is that they focused on providing frameworks independent from the application environments that they are supposed to manage. These frameworks were essentially toolkits for solving particular management problems such as managing configurations, monitoring and diagnostics. Users of these frameworks had to undertake costly implementation efforts to integrate the toolkits with the application environments, and integrate the different toolkits for solving different management problems. The ensuing maintenance of these kinds of implementations turned out to be cost prohibitive for even the largest IT organizations.

Furthermore, little attention was paid to building in management awareness in application platforms. As a result, traditional system management tools had a hard time managing these applications, as these tools were built with limited insights on how the applications and their platforms operate, and the tools had to rely on the limited information that the platforms exposed.

A better strategy is to build application platforms together with the tools for managing them. This integrated approach ensures useful management information is exposed that your management tools and your application platform work well together. In addition, integrated management software that is designed to support specific types of application environments already have the necessary integration defined. They are much more useful out-of-the-box, and reduce the costs and risks for implementation. A key reason why the new approach works better is that applications and the tools for managing them are engineered to work together.

New Management Connectors to Integrate Oracle Enterprise Manager with HP Management Products

2009-04-08T21:21:00.001-07:00

One of the most frequently asked questions that our customers ask about Oracle Enterprise Manager is its ability to integrate with other management tools. This is understandable. As good as Enterprise Manager is at managing Oracle database and applications, many IT departments already use other tools for managing their network, keeping track of their storage, and running their helpdesks. Enterprise Manager provides a rich selection of approaches for exchanging data with other tools. These integration capabilities just got better this week with the release of three new connectors, which include:

- Management Connector for HP Service Center
- Management Connector for HP Service Manager
- Management Connector for HP OpenView Operations Manager

These three connectors join a growing collection of similar connectors for integrating Oracle Enterprise Manager with Siebel Helpdesk, BMC Remedy Helpdesk, PeopleSoft Helpdesk, Microsoft Operations Manager and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. They help automate ITIL problem and incident management processes by automatically generating helpdesk tickets, forwarding alerts, and synchronizing status updates bi-directionally.

Because these integrations are done at the Enterprise Manager platform level, they benefit all the different users of Enterprise Manager from DBAs to infrastructure administrators to application administrators. In other words, if you want to use Enterprise Manager to manage Oracle E-Business Suite or Siebel or a Java EE app running in Oracle Weblogic Server, and you still want to use HP tools to carry out other tasks, you can now use these connectors to achieve the integration.

More information about Enterprise Manager's Connectors can be found here.

Read the press release here.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 Platform Enhancements

2009-03-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I gave an overview on our new release of Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5. Starting with this article, I am going to cover each area of improvement in more detail. The first topic to discuss is platform enhancements, as aside from Weblogic support, these are the most important changes we made in 10gR5. Platform improvements are important because they benefit everybody. Most of the Enterprise Manager management packs and plug-in's are built on a common platform. This approach allows Oracle to achieve economy of scale when it comes to creating management tools for various technologies, and it provides simplicity and efficiency to our customers as a common platform makes it easier to deploy various tools and reduces training needs.

Here are the key improvements.

Default Monitoring Templates – Monitoring Templates help Enterprise Manager deliver its “grid management” vision of managing a “grid” of objects as a single entity. Specifically, templates can be used to specify common thresholds in order to simplify monitoring setups. Before 10gR5, one could define monitoring templates, but these templates have to be manually applied to new targets that are added to Enterprise Manager. In 10gR5, this step is automated through a default option in monitoring template. If you mark a template as the default for a given target type, then the template would be automatically applied every time you add a new target of this type to Enterprise Manager. In addition, a new out-of-box report and reporting elements make it easier to review template application history.

Improved Alert State Management – Prior to 10gR5, once an alert is raised when a metric threshold is crossed, the alert would stay in Enterprise Manager until the next scheduled evaluation of the metric. This was not very convenient, as administrators want to get more timely feedback on the corrective actions that they take, and have the alert state be cleared as soon as possible. Starting with 10gR5, administrators can force a metric re-evaluation to be carried out immediately in order to verify the effectiveness of the fix. In addition, administrators can better manage their log file based alerts by setting duration based notification rules that clear such alerts on a periodic basis, or by using new EMCLI verbs that support bulk clearing of such alerts.

Repeated Notification – Repeat notifications are now supported for all notification methods – OS Command, PL/SQL procedures and SNMP traps.

Customized Notification Messages – EM 10gR5 provides more flexibility in the way that administrators can customize the format of email notifications. The content of the notification can be customized to include selected target properties and other information that provides more context about the alerts. Considering the multitude of devices that people use to receive notifications and the varying limitations of these devices, having this flexibility to customize the messages should be quite useful.

EM Backup / Recovery via EMCLI – New verbs are added to emcli so that backup and recovery operations for Enterprise Manager components can now be performed via the command line. These operations include the ability to resynchronize the repository, export and import OMS configurations, and resynchronize an agent based on information in the repository. Besides the fact that many power users like to use command line tools, having this command line support enable automation of these operations via scripting.

Management Pack License Bulk Updates – Bulk activation and deactivation of management pack license can now be performed in either the Enterprise Manager console or via emcli. We probably should have added this feature long time ago. After you pay for the packs, the least that we could do is to make it easier for you to start using them. Well, better late then never. :)

Automatic Enterprise Agent Software Download – Grid Control has provided several means to automate the process of deploying agents in the past, but one task has been manual – getting the agent software package from Oracle in the first place! We have automated this step too in 10gR5. Just go to the agent page and pick out what you want and the tool will take care of getting it from My Oracle Support. Yes, this is another long overdue item.

Privilege Propagating Group – Group is one of the most useful platform features of Enterprise Manager. It lets you arrange a set of related targets together so that they can be monitored together more easily. Privilege Propagating Group extends this concept further by simplifying the allocation of access privilege to the set of targets under a group. Once you grant an access privilege to a Privilege Propagating Group, all member targets of that group inherits the same access privilege.

Additional Access Privileges – New fine-grained target privileges to support principle of least privilege are provided: Blackout Target, Manage Target Metrics, Configure Target and Manage Target Alerts. In addition, the Enterprise Manager user interface is enhanced to make it easier to manage Privilege Delegation settings. Privilege Delegation can be set for User Defined Metrics, Corrective Actions and Database Replay features. Lastly, corrective actions that a user defined may be shared with other users by granting them the proper access privileges.

Third Party Security Certificates – EM 10gR5 supports the use of third party security certificates to set up secured communications between the Enterprise Manager's server, agent, and the web browser client.

Enhanced Auditing – EM 10gR5 lets you track Enterprise Manager operations more easily. As Enterprise Manager becomes the tool to manage applications, middleware infrastructure and databases centrally, it is important to be able to trace these operations. Enhanced auditing capabilities include enriched audit records, audit data search, built-in externalization service to externalize audit data into external store, and compatibility with Oracle Diagnostic Logging (ODL) format to allow integration with Oracle Audit Vault.

Simplified User Defined Policy Interface – Configuration Policy is a very powerful feature in Grid Control to help IT proactive about avoiding configuration related problems. Prior to 10gR5, it was very difficult to create custom policies. This problem is solved in 10gR5 with a wizard driven interface to create User Defined Policies, allowing you to mitigate system vulnerabilities by defining and implementing configuration policies specific to their operational best practices, governance and industry standard requirements. The new interface allows you to create, edit, test, delete, export and import user defined policies.

User Defined Policy Group – In addition to be User Defined Policies, you may also defined User Defined Policy Groups to group together user defined and Oracle-provided policies. Once these policy groups are created, they can be evaluated just like other policy groups.

There you have it. These are the key platform enhancements for Enterprise Manager 10gR5, which are applicable whether you are managing your packaged Oracle applications using our Application Management Packs, your middleware infrastructure using our Middleware Management Packs, your Oracle Database using our Oracle Database Management Packs, or 3rd party technologies using our System Monitoring Plug-in's. There is something for everyone!

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is Here!

2009-03-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR5 is finally here! I hope you all enjoyed the launch webcast this morning. If you missed it, here is the link to the recording.

As I mentioned in my post last week, this release is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. So what are those goodies? Here are some of the most important enhancements.

For Application Administrators

This release takes Enterprise Manager Grid Control's top-down application management capabilities to the next level. Of all the new and improved features, probably the most significant is our expanded support for the Oracle Weblogic Server. Weblogic support is important because this component serves as the foundation of many Oracle products. Weblogic not only forms the basis of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is the foundation for upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications, but it is also a key technology used to modernize the various packaged Oracle applications. In other words, improved support for Weblogic management benefits not only administrators of custom Java applications, but also administrators of packaged Oracle applications. For example, the latest Siebel CRM 8.1.1 release incorporates Oracle Application Development Framework into its software stack to enable the latest generation of customer self service applications. As Oracle evolves the current packaged applications using Java EE technologies, it is important that the tools for managing these applications are evolved with them.

One thing to keep in mind is that Enterprise Manager's support for Weblogic is not a completely new thing. In fact, Enterprise Manager began supporting Weblogic monitoring in 2006, two years before Oracle acquired BEA. The support was part of Enterprise Manager's heterogeneous management capabilities, which also include support for monitoring Websphere, JBoss and .NET. In 10gR5, Weblogic support was strengthened to include the ability to:
- monitor the performance of top Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) & JSP’s in deployed applications;
- discover and monitor web services deployed to WebLogic Server
- monitor server resources (e.g. data sources, JMS servers, resource adapters, JOLT connection pools)
- view, compare and track more configuration items such as JVM vendor/version, additional tuning parameters, cluster configuration, JMS resources, virtual hosts, JOLT connection pools, and configuration files

For packaged applications, Application Management Pack for Siebel was refreshed to add official support for Siebel 8.1.1, the brand new version of Siebel CRM that Oracle released recently. In the old days, it was always a challenge to get third party management vendors to support new Siebel releases in a timely manner. As the old saying goes – if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. Now that we build our own management tools, we can ensure that our new application releases are covered. In addition to 8.1.1 support, this new release of the Siebel Pack also include Workflow Process Monitoring, Workflow Policy Monitoring, Event Log Analysis, improved Discovery and Application Service Monitoring.

In addition to the updated Siebel Pack, we released new application accelerators for Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). RUEI helps IT monitor actual end user experience, answering important questions such as: Who logged onto the applications? What did the users do? What response time did they get and what sort of errors did they run into? Following the approach that we started with our application management packs to provide tools engineered for specific packaged Oracle applications, our two accelerators – one for Oracle E-Business S uite and one for Siebel CRM, provide out of the box management capabilities for these Oracle applications so that the time to get the tool up and running is reduced.

These three packaged application management improvements are just the first wave of enhanced support for Oracle applications that we are introducing for 2009. Stay tuned for more to come.

In addition to better Weblogic Server support and improved management for Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite, 10gR5 also contains support for Oracle Coherence application grid technology, improved support Oracle Service Bus, BPEL Process Monitoring, Java Application Diagnostics, Composite Application Modeling and Monitoring and Application Configuration Management. There is way too much information to cover in one post, so check out this document for an overview, and come back to this blog for more indepth discussions later on.

For DBAs

Oracle Enterprise Manager started out as a database management tool, and this 10gR5 release should please DBAs who are looking for further improvements to an already impressive package. This release provides support for Oracle Database 11gR1, enabling multiple database servers to be managed centrally. You may wonder – how could 10g Enterprise Manager Grid Control manage 11g Oracle Database? The answer is even though the two products carry similar versioning schemes, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Oracle Database are on different release schedules. Therefore, there is nothing unusual about using Enterprise Manager 10g to manage an 11g Oracle Database.

Some of the key enhancements for Oracle Database Management includes:
- support for 11g database features such as ADDM for RAC, real-time SQL monitoring, partition advisor and automatic SQL tuning;
- database replay – an automatic way to capture product workload, copying it to a test system, setting up the software and the test database to reflect the state of the source system at time of capture, deploying replay clients, orchestrating the replay process, and analyzing the replay results;
- database change propagation – synchronize data dictionary to propagate schema changes from a dictionary baseline or a database to a target database;
- some of these capabilities actually existed in the 9i version of Enterprise Manager and have brought it back with full integration within Grid Control;
- customizable tile based views to monitor waits and other metrics across multiple RAC nodes in a cluster;
- improved performance workflows for cluster cache coherency, historic views, and drilldown;
- service-centric monitoring facilitates the monitoring of workflows and drilldowns for RAC services;
- a new HA Console to monitor overall HA configuration status and initiate operations;
- a Maximum Availability Architecture Configuration Advisor page allows you to evaluate the configuration and identify solutions for protection from computer, site, storage, human and data corruption failures, enabling workflows to implement Oracle Recommended solutions;
- automatic configuring of Oracle-recommended Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) for databases with minimum downtime;
- you can now migrate database to ASM, and convert single instance database to RAC all with minimum downtime using standby technology to minimize downtime;
- a Streams dashboard, along with improved monitoring of streams configurations, allows you to monitor streams components as well as end-to-end paths for Latency and Throughput metrics.

These enhancements help DBAs plan their database changes better by leveraging production workload in order to analyze the potential impact of database changes, make changes more easily by automating the migration of changes, and ensure the database is more robust by implementing leading database maximum availability practices prescribed by Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture guidelines.

For CIOs

For a long time, IT decision makers have had to make important IT decisions on less than perfect information. Worst yet, the information available often did not represent the reality faced by IT's customers – the lines of business. It puts IT at a rather disadvantaged position. With Real User Experience Insight and Enterprise Manager's Service Level Management capabilities, CIO can get much better information to demonstrate the value that IT delivers, and to ask for the needed resources using factual information to back up the requests.

Equally important, the expanding capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control mean that many important IT assets can now be managed better and with fewer resources. IT is always shorthanded, so freeing up resources mean that the CIO now has the flexibility to invest on new projects that his/her counterparts in line of business have been asking for in order to drive the organization forward.

Enterprise Manager's expanding footprint also means that IT departments can move forward with their goals of simplifying their vendor management by consolidating their spending with fewer vendors. Gone are the days when organizations have to go to different vendors to get applications, middleware, development tools, databases, O/S and enterprise management systems.

For Applications' Business Sponsors

While not direct users of Oracle Enterprise Managers, the line of business sponsors of the applications also benefit from all these improvements. For example, Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) can be used by not only IT administrators, but also business analysts to perform click stream analysis in order to understand consumer behaviors on eCommerce and self-service applications, where increasingly amount of business activities are carried out. When the data collected from RUEI is combined with those captured from the business applications and analyzed using tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence, businesses can get unprecedented clarity on business activities. Traditionally, data captured from business applications such as Siebel E-Commerce show the business activities that actually took place – the service requests that are filed or the orders that are placed. They don't tell why transactions did not happen as users abort their shopping activities. Data from RUEI tells the other side of the picture. Since Oracle develop business applications, enterprise management tools, and business intelligence technologies, we are in the best position to help business leaders put all these information together to achieve insights.

I hope that you find these capabilities appetizing. But there's more. Check out the complete list of improvements in the first chapter of Oracle Enterprise Manager Concepts Guide, and come back to this blog as I cover the features in more details in the coming weeks.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is Coming!

2009-02-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

Some of you may notice that I have been awfully quiet on my blog for the past two months. You may wonder – did something happen to this guy? Well, I am still here at Oracle. The reason why I have not done much writing recently is because I have been head down working with my colleagues to ship a new release and to plan for the next ones.

I am happy to say that the new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 is going to be released real soon. I can't talk about what is in the product just yet, but I can tell you that it is chock-full of goodies that we believe will please everyone from application administrators to DBAs to CIOs and even the business sponsors of your applications. If you really want to find out what the release has in store for you, tune in to our product launch webcast on Tuesday, March 3 at 9 a.m. PST. Our fearless leader, Richard Sarwal, will host this event. After the webcast, come back to my blog to get more “inside scope” on the product.

See you next Tuesday.

People, Process, Technology - The Right Tool

2009-01-15T20:53:00.000-08:00

In my day job, I manage products for managing applications at Oracle, so I spend an awful lot of time with management technologies. From this, you probably think that I would tell you to go get a tool whenever you have a problem to solve. Tools are important, but the truth is they don't replace people and processes. Having the best tools in the world isn't going to help if they are not used properly. I wrote about ITIL v3 in the last article of this series. ITIL is one of the many frameworks available, and different people have different opinions about ITIL. The important thing is not whether to implement ITIL, but to have the right people to implement the right IT management processes using one of the best practice frameworks as guidance first.

Tools come in after that. Theoretically, one could implement many IT best practices manually, especially if you throw enough people who know what they are doing at the problem. Realistically though, processes are enhanced through the use of tools, and many important IT management tasks simply do not get done without tool support, as there are not enough people to do things manually in most cases. In this regard, having the right tools can really make a difference.

Picture: Is this the right management tool?

So what are the attributes of the “right” tool? Here are a couple of my ideas.

#1 - It solves the problem.

This may seem obvious. The tool has to work. How well a particular tool works depends on whether it is designed specifically for the job. For example, it isn't rocket science to build a basic monitoring tool that collects a bunch of data from a set of monitored objects, filter the data, and provide some sort of alerts and reports. Every monitoring tool out there can do these things. Some, however, require a lot more work to set up because they are essentially toolkits and whoever uses them have to spend a lot of time integrating these toolkits with the technologies they are supposed to monitor. In contrast, a monitoring tool that is designed for managing a particular piece of technology would work much better out of the box.

#2 - It is comprehensive and integrated

There are many different types of management problems, and it takes different tools to solve them. However, having multiple tools can be rather problematic. For example, the overhead is higher as all these tools need to interact with the underlying technologies being managed. Data is presented in silos and people often end up wasting a lot of time trying to get the tools work together. Tools that provide broader sets of integrated capabilities are better.

#3 - It is easy to integrate

The first two attributes may conflict with each other. The truth is each of the management vendors has its own strengths and weaknesses. Some are better at managing mainframes, others are more equipped with managing networks, and some excel with handling databases and applications. Finding a single vendor that offers comprehensive and integrated products that are designed specifically for managing everything is just impossible. You probably want to standardize on a couple core vendors that serve your needs, and make sure that their products can talk to each other.

Leading Practices of Application Management Webinars for January 2009

2009-01-05T17:35:00.000-08:00

Our webinar series on Leading Practices of Application Management is entering its third month, and we have an exciting lineup of topics to cover:

- Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
- Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
- PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
- E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices

You may register at this website. Passcode for registration is "application".

Subject: Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
Date & Time: 1/6/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Amjad Afanah; Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130802901
Description: Business Intelligence Management Pack anchors Oracle’s solution for proactively managing your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition environment. Designed and implemented by Oracle’s application experts, the pack provides comprehensive, integrated, and BI EE-specific capabilities that help you achieve better application performance and availability while keeping your application IT operational costs down.

In this webinar, we will present to you the key features of the product, which include:
- Service Level Management
- Configuration Management
- BI EE Component Monitoring
- Synthetic User Monitoring

Subject: Siebel Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/13/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: Richard Exley; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Maximum Availability Architecture
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130803325
Description: This webinar reviews best practices for the Oracle technology stack and how customers using Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management are leveraging Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC); Oracle Clusterware, including disaster recovery strategies; Oracle Enterprise Manager and Maximum Availability Architecture to get peak availability out of their Siebel implementation.

Subject: PeopleSoft Performance Tips and Techniques
Date & Time: 1/20/2009, 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST
Presenter: David Nix; Consulting Member of Technical Staff, PeopleTools
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804448
Description: Everyone wants their applications from Oracle's PeopleSoft product line to operate with maximum performance. In this webinar, a PeopleSoft performance and benchmark expert shares tips and techniques for maximizing the performance of your PeopleSoft applications. Those new to tuning a PeopleSoft application as well as seasoned tuning experts will come away with new techniques that will help them improve the performance of their PeopleSoft applications.

Subject: E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Best Practices
Date & Time: 1/27/2009, 10 a.m. EST / 3 p.m. GMT
Presenter: Max Arderius; Manager, ATG Development
Registration: http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=130804016
Description: This webinar covers the Oracle E-Business Suite architecture and explains various techniques for installing and cloning by use of Rapid Install, Rapid Clone, and Application Management Pack cloning automation.

A Holistic Approach to Siebel CRM Monitoring

2008-12-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

What should we monitor on Siebel CRM?

It turns out to be a rather common question, even for some of our long time customers. In fact, I was on a call with a customer this morning and heard a rather lively discussion amongst its staff on this topic. I probably should write a white paper about this. However, knowing how much work I have to finish before taking some time off for Christmas, it could be a while before I can publish a formal white paper, so let me try to share some of my thoughts in real time. Consider this a first installment of a best practice white paper.

Before I talk about what needs to be monitored, let me define what I mean by monitoring. Monitoring, as defined by the Webster Dictionary, is to watch, to keep track of, or check usually for a specific purpose. In technical sense, it is the set of activities to gather telemetry data from a piece of hardware or software, analyze the data, and provide some sort of notification if some sort of exceptions are found. Monitoring is closely related to diagnostic. In fact, the same piece of telemetry can be used for both purposes. One might want to monitor CPU usage using data gathered in real time, and examine a time series of CPU trend in diagnosing performance data. Personally, I tend to classify monitoring as the set of tasks that lead to the realization of an exception, and diagnostic as the set of tasks that follow to determine problem root causes. In ITIL terms, monitoring may lead to creation of an incident, while diagnostic is carried out in incident and problem management.

Now that I have defined what I mean by monitoring, let's talk about what needs to be monitored.

The obvious things to monitor are CPU, memory, disk space, and I/O (disk, network, etc...). These are the most basic computing resources that Siebel and its underlying database depend on, and they are finite resources, so it makes sense to monitor them. However, these are not the only things, nor are they necessary the most important things.

One thing that makes monitoring Siebel different from monitoring other technologies is that Siebel is an application. As an application, it interacts with users directly, whereas most users do not deal directly with the database, or the load balancer, or the storage devices, and so on. Consequently, the primary purpose of application monitoring is to make sure that the application is providing the service level that users expect in order to do their jobs.

Many things can impact application service level. In fact, every component in a Siebel environment, including but not limited to the Siebel application server, web server, gateway server, report server, CTI, database, storage device, server, network switch, router, load balancer, WAN, etc... can all impact service level. Therefore, it is important to monitor everything, right? Yes and no.

Traditionally, application monitoring means monitoring all the components, and the health of the application is the aggregate health of all the components. However, this kind of bottom up approach is increasingly ineffective because of the increasing amount of redundancy built into production application environments, and because many applications are becoming more and more service oriented. For example, with RAID, it is no big deal to lose a disk. With Oracle RAC, you can lose a database server node and the database will keep on running. With Siebel app server clustering, you can lose an app server altogether but the application would continue to function (yes, users logged onto that server would need to log on again). The point that I want to make is that while it is bad to have component failures, they are not the big catastrophes that they used to be in their service level impacts.

The starting point of Siebel monitoring should be from the top – monitor from the end user perspective by focusing on interactive user sessions and batch jobs, and then move downward to the components. If users have problems accessing application functionalities and getting good response times, or if batch jobs are not getting run within targeted batch window, you clearly have a problem with the application, and those problems may be caused by component level outages. On the other hand, if a server goes down but interactive user sessions and batch jobs are working just fine, you have less to worry about. You'll still want to find out and fix this problem, because the service level of your Siebel environment may drop below your target if another server goes down. Still, the server outage is less urgent than it used to be. In traditional component based monitoring approach, a server outage would be a fatal problem that demanded immediate action. In this top-down end user focused approach, a server outage would most likely be a warning unless there is no redundancy for the component.

Both active and passive approaches should be used for monitoring interactive user workload, and critical alerts should be generated if exceptions occur. I wrote about these two monitoring approaches in two previous postings (1, 2), so you can refer to those articles for more details. For batch workload, the key thing to focused on is whether the job finishes on time and whether errors or warnings are generated in processing the entries. Most of the data that you need to watch are in Siebel log files.

The next set of things to monitor are resources. They are important to monitor because resources tend to be finite. If they run out, processing either stops or is delayed. Keep in mind about the relative importance of these resource at the component level though – resource outage may not be a critical event in the grand scheme of things. Traditional resources to monitor include CPU, memory, disk space and I/O, but don't forget about Siebel-specific artifacts such as task count, and when monitoring traditional resource, you need to do it in the context of Siebel. In other words, you should monitor not only server level CPU, but also CPU consumption specific to the Siebel processes.

Lastly, monitor for exceptions, which can be errors showing up on log files, or summarized Siebel server and component statistics for number of level 0 and 1 errors, number of component crashes, restarts, or even number of database connection retries. These are important to monitor in the sense that while a single exception may not be a critical problem, a swamp of these errors happening within a relatively small time window is usually a bad sign, and may point to problems that could cause service level target to be missed.

What about the other Siebel server and component statistics? For the most part, the other statistics are useful for diagnostic and performance tuning purpose. They are not very useful for generating alerts. For example, it is not really practical to set an absolute threshold on a metric such as Average Reply Size, which shows the amount of data Siebel returns. What is a good value to set a threshold anyway? On the other hand, it would be useful to capture the information, and see how the value changes before and after a major application change in order to understand performance impacts. Statistics such as this one should be collected and saved into a database so that trend analysis can be performed.

I just touched on the surface of what should be monitored. There's more, as some of the more critical components require specific approaches. I guess I better add the white paper to my to-do list.

Three New Leading Practices of Application Management Webinars for December

2008-11-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Last month, Oracle launched a new webinar series on Leading Practices of Application Management. We are following up the initial set of events with new subjects for December.

Webinars in December include:

The first three are new subjects, while the last two are re-runs that are scheduled at times more suitable to the APAC audience. One of the challenges that we face when scheduling these webinars is the global nature of Oracle's customer base. There is no single time that works. In fact, we have to come up with three time slots - 11 a.m. Pacific for the Americas, 3 p.m. GMT for EMEA, which covers everything from U.K. to Turkey, and 5 a.m. GMT, which should be a suitable time for everyone from India to Australia.

Oracle E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Techniques Deep Dive
December 2, 2008 at 11 a.m. Pacific / 2 p.m. Eastern
Registration: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=55734151&preLogin=true

Three Steps to Better Performance and User Adoption for Siebel CRM
December 9, 2008 at 10 a.m. Eastern / 3 p.m. GMT
Registration: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=55734284&preLogin=true

PeopleSoft Service Level Management Best Practices
December 16, 2008 at 11 a.m. Pacific / 2 p.m. Eastern
Registration: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=55734323&preLogin=true

Business Intelligence Management Pack Overview
December 23, 2008 at 5 a.m. GMT / 10:30 a.m. New Delhi / 1 p.m. Beijing / 4 p.m. Melbourne
Registration: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=55734387&preLogin=true

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Overview
December 30, 2008 at 5 a.m. GMT / 10:30 a.m. New Delhi / 1 p.m. Beijing / 4 p.m. Melbourne
Registration: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=55734394&preLogin=true

People, Process, Technology - ITIL v3

2008-11-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

From my previous post, you probably get the idea that I view ITIL favorably. It is a comprehensive framework that provides a lot of good advice, and it provides a common language for IT practitioners.

While it is useful, learning about ITIL can be a challenge by itself, as it is like learning another language even though the language may already be somewhat familiar. Last year, we conducted a survey at OpenWorld, which asked several questions about practices on service level management and change management. Many people checked the box indicating that they had some sort of processes in place. Yet, when we asked whether people were implementing ITIL, the same people who checked those boxes stated that they were not implementing ITIL. That was rather strange as service level management and change management were two of ITIL processes, so either people did not know what ITIL stood for, or did not think their process implementation was up to the standard that ITIL defined. We think the former reason was more probable.

So what is in the “ITIL v3 language?”

ITIL v3 is made up of five application lifecycle phases, which Wikipedia describes as:

Service Strategy - focuses on the identification of market opportunities for which services could be developed in order to meet a requirement on the part of internal or external customers. The output is a strategy for the design, implementation, maintenance and continual improvement of the service as an organizational capability and a strategic asset. Key areas of this volume are Service Portfolio Management and Financial Management.

Service Design - focuses on the activities that take place in order to develop the strategy into a design document which addresses all aspects of the proposed service, as well as the processes intended to support it. Key areas of this volume are Availability Management, Capacity Management, Continuity Management and Security Management.

Service Transition - focuses on the implementation of the output of the service design activities and the creation of a production service or modification of an existing service. There is an area of overlap between Service Transition and Service Operation. Key areas of this volume are Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management and Service Knowledge Management.

Service Operation - focuses on the activities required to operate the services and maintain their functionality as defined in the Service Level Agreements with the customers. Key areas of this volume are Incident Management, Problem Management and Request Fulfillment. A new process added to this area is Event Management, which is concerned with normal and exception condition events. Events have been defined into three categories:
- Informational events -- which are logged
- Warning events -- also called alerts, where an event exceeds a specified threshold
- Critical events -- which typically will lead to the generation of Incidents

Continual Service Improvement - focuses on the ability to deliver continual improvement to the quality of the services that the IT organization delivers to the business. Key areas of this volume are Service Reporting, Service Measurement and Service Level Management.
If you are familiar with ITIL v2, you probably recognizes that many of these processes are similar to those in v2. I think one way to look at v3 is that it is an improved and superset of of v2.

For more details on these processes, you need to get the official books from Office of Government and Commerce, the United Kingdom agency who serves as the official publisher of this methodology.

People, Process, Technology - Process Frameworks

2008-11-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I made a point that people, process, and technology are all pre-requisites for achieving success in enterprise application projects. I am going to focus today's post on processes, specifically process frameworks around application lifecycle management.

Application Lifecycle Management is not a new thing, as there exists not just one, but many process frameworks that address its various aspects. Examples include:

- Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
- Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT)
- Oracle Unified Method (OUM)
- Oracle Application Implementation Method (AIM)
- Siebel Results Roadmap
- PeopleSoft Compass
- Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)
- Rational Unified Process

You probably notice that Oracle alone has several methodologies, so there is no shortage of process to follow. By the way, in case you are wondering, the various Oracle methodologies eventually are supposed to get merged into the Oracle Unified Method. That can be a subject of a whole different discussion.

I am not sure if there is such a thing as the perfect methodology. Some of these methodologies are more development focused, while others are more operations focused, but I think there is increasing realization that an application project's complete lifecycle starts from the moment when the project is kicked off and ends when the application is retired, so a comprehensive application lifecycle management process framework needs to address both development as well as operational needs.

Take ITIL as an example. In ITIL v2, much of the focus was on operational management. The two core books of Service Delivery and Service Support addressed the processes of:

- Service Level Management
- Capacity Management
- Availability Management
- Continuity Management
- Financial Management
- Change Management
- Configuration Management
- Release Management
- Incident Management
- Problem Management

Infrastructure Management, Security Management, Asset Management and Application Management were in separate books. Except for the Application Management book, which depicted an application management lifecycle, ITIL v2 did not point out explicitly that many of the Service Management processes really need to start before the application goes into production.

In fact, in the Application Management book, it separated the pre-production activities in the first three phases as Application Development activities, while the activities in last three phases were classified as Service Management activities. That to me was a bit weird as it implied that the work to come up with a service level agreement do not take place until the application is ready to go into production. In reality, many of the considerations for defining service level goals should be done as part of overall planning in an application project.

In ITIL v3, which was released in May 2007, the lifecycle aspect of application projects took center stage. All the existing ITIL functional processes were re-oriented into five lifecycle phases, which include:

- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement

These five phases cover everything from initial planning to on-going postmortem analysis needed to drive continual improvements. To me, this makes a lot more sense. If someone needs to manage capacity, or ensure availability of the application, which traditionally are seen as more of operational activities, the planning aspects of these really need to be carried out by the operations team up front as the functionalities of the application are getting implemented in parallel by the developers. Even something as “operations centric” as monitoring has a pre-production component – one needs to plan what needs to be monitored and instrument the application accordingly.

As the ITIL v3 evolution illustrates, a comprehensive framework that provides holistic recommendation to application lifecycle management best practices needs to cover all phases of the lifecycle and addresses both development and operational activities. As an added bonus, ITIL also provides a common vendor-neutral language to talk about various issues. Many terminologies are so overloaded, especially with vendors (Oracle included) all using them to suit their needs, that it can be difficult to talk about many issues without re-defining the terminologies at the beginning of the discussions first. ITIL pretty much eliminates this confusion. Therefore, I am going to make reference to it in my future blog posts.

Oracle Launches Leading Practices of Application Management Webinar Series

2008-10-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

Oracle is launching a new webinar series on application management. We have seen that oftentimes, technology is not the only source of challenges for customers. To achieve targeted application service level cost effectively, one needs to consider organizational and process issues holistically also. In this weekly webinar series, we plan to talk about not only the technologies for managing applications, but more importantly, the leading practices and how various tools can be used to facilitate the implementation of practices.

In November, we plan to present overviews of our application management packs, the centerpiece of our management tools for packaged applications. After that, we will begin our deep dive into specific topics for each application domain. See the bottom of this post for some example topics.

You may click here to get the summarized list of upcoming webinars, and here to get a more detailed description for each event. These webinars will be recorded and made available for on demand playback.

November 2008 Schedule

For schedule and registration options visit webcasts page on OTN.

Upcoming Topics in December and Beyond

Oracle E-Business Suite Install and Cloning Techniques Deep Dive
Key Steps that You can Take to Improve the Performance and Availability of Siebel Applications
Service Level Management Best Practices for PeopleSoft Enterprise
Oracle@Oracle: Managing Oracle’s Internal Implementation of Front and Back Office Applications

People, Process, Technology

2008-10-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went to Europe to present our application management products at a field training event. To start off the presentation, I wanted to make an attention grabbing point in order to set the stage for the rest of the discussion, so I cited cases of enterprise application projects that failed spectacularly. If you wonder what those projects were, let's just say they involved software made by a German company, as well as software made by a U.S. company. I tried to maintain balance in my critique.

In everyone of those cases, the project failed not only because of the software involved, but also the organizations and their project management. Common problems were ill defined requirements, lack of testing (functional and load), unrealistic time lines, undersized capacity, lack of operational management discipline, lack of training (developers, administrators, end users) and last but not least, software technical problems (they were software implementation projects after all). The very annoying thing is that these enterprise application project failures were not isolated incidents. They still keep on happening.

In my own opinion, a key part of the problem is that while many organizations aspire to achieve the benefits that enterprise applications provide, they underestimate the amount of “homework” that they need to do to realize those benefits. Technology is only one of the components to consider in the homework assignments. The people and process aspects are equally, if not more important. Together, people, process, and technology form the basis of achieving success in enterprise application projects and they must be managed properly.

Take CRM application as an example. There are proven cases that the use of CRM applications, when implemented as part of a business process re-engineering effort to streamline marketing, sales or services activities, can lead to superior business results. However, those results are predicated on:

the proper business process design
the proper application design to support the business processes effectively
the proper implementation that adheres to the application design
the proper functional testing to make sure that the implementation is done according to the specification
the proper load testing to make sure that the application provides the required response time and scales to projected usage pattern
the proper service level management practices to set operational targets, measure actual service levels, report results, and make improvements so that the application provides the needed service levels required by the business
the proper availability management practices and technologies to ensure that business availability requirements are met
the proper performance management practices to ensure the necessary response time and batch performance to support various business activities and utilizing computing resources effectively
the proper configuration and change management practices to ensures that changes are made with proper impact analysis, control and accountability
the proper security management practices to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application system and the information
the proper data quality management practices to ensure the usefulness of the information
the proper training for developers, administrators and end users so people know how to implement, manage and use the software properly
the proper organization of people and effective communications amongst stakeholders,
the proper alignment of interests of various stakeholders and the organization's goals
the proper management of vendor relationships so tasks are carried out properly by the vendors and the proper support is provided; this is especially critical if contractors are used

and last but not least, the proper governance. Almost everyone of these factors involve getting the right people to do the right thing at the right time using the right tool, and many of these factors are important whether one uses SaaS, hosts the application with an application hosting provider, or runs the application in-house. These are all homework that organizations need to work on if they want to realize the full benefits of deploying enterprise applications.

Oftentimes, these homework do not get done, or they do not get done properly. One reason I believe organizations don't do the proper homework is that they underestimate the complexity of enterprise applications. A friend of mine, who happens to work for an aerospace firm designing rockets, once commented to me that he couldn't figure out why companies have such a hard time implementing business applications. Running an application to store and retrieve some data from the database didn't seem like rocket science to him.

Implementing application is definitely not rocket science. After all, an application is not a rocket, so the science involved should be “application science” instead of rocket science. Even though implementing an application is not rocket science, it doesn't mean it is easy. Getting a cruise missile to hit a target hundreds of miles away is hard, but so is maintaining sub-second response time for 10,000 concurrent call center users, or thousands of students who all try register for classes last minute, or thousands of users on an eCommerce website all trying to buy the on sale item at the peak of the Christmas shopping season. Complexities in enterprise applications exist because of the complexities of the problems that they try to solve. While many vendors, Oracle certainty included, are on a quest to simplify the applications, let's just say it will still be more complex to implement enterprise applications than installing a Nintendo Wii at home for the foreseeable future.

By the way, the complexities and the associated “homework requirement” is not that different from other complex systems. Even something as commonplace as the automobile requires regular maintenance – oil change, tune up, proper tire pressure, etc... – to run smoothly and maintain good gas mileage. Implementing applications without doing the proper homework is like running a car without maintenance. Sooner or later, the application would stop working just like a car would stop working.

It's almost noon as I get to this part of the blog, so I think I am going to head out to grab something to eat. Let me resume this discussion on people, process and technology on my next blog entry.

Notes from Oracle OpenWorld 2008

2008-09-27T13:58:00.001-07:00

OpenWorld is over!!! As much as I enjoyed the event, I felt a sense of relieve when I stepped out of my last meeting at the Customer Visit Center at Moscone North on Thursday afternoon. One of my colleagues saw me and commented that I looked “dead serious”. I told him to leave out the “serious” part. I was just “dead”, after being sleep deprived for the whole week. I slept on my bus ride back to headquarters.

Friday was a regular workday (no vacation!). There was a product review meeting for the next release of Enterprise Manager, a planning conference call for field events, a brief chat with my boss, conversation with my team on the to-do list for this quarter, and reviewing of the notes that I took at the event and following up with a long list of people I met to keep me quite busy.

Speaking of notes, I took plenty of it from the interesting conversations at the event. Here is a sample.

Help us standardize – One of the pain points that I heard from customers was that operating silos have made it difficult to manage their applications. Different teams use different tools, which don't work well with each other. Different teams developed different practices, which in some cases conflicted with each other. Common tools, and common best practice recommendations from Oracle are highly desirable.

Help us manage changes – I heard this over and over throughout the week whether it was discussion on Sunday's OAUG Change Management SIG, conversations at Demoground, or on Thursday's application management roundtable. Change is hard even with tools such as iSetup and ADM, as they do not yet cover the complete change workflow. Another dimension in change management is access control, as different members of the team different authorizations for changing the different parts of the applications, and our software needs to be smart enough to enforce the separations.

Help us figure out the proper way to use your software – One particular example was whether people should set up a single Enterprise Manager Grid Control environment or multiple environments. Our default recommendation is single instance, but there are technical as well as organizational factors that might make it better to have multiple instances. I will write about this more in a future article.

Speaking of organizational factors, I believe that it takes more than just software to solve many of the problems that were discussed throughout the week. Ultimately, it takes a combination of people, process and technology to get things done. People refer to all of us working at Oracle, at partner companies and at customer organizations to overcome the various application management challenges, and we need to keep on talking amongst ourselves to exchange ideas. Do the issues above sound familiar? Summit your comments either on my blog or on discussion forums.

We have created several forums on mix.oracle.com to carry out our conversations. These groups include:

Oracle E-Business Suite Lifecycle Management

Siebel Install / Manage / Upgrade

PeopleTools

If you are an architect or senior IT manager and wish to talk about more strategic or policy issues, here are the groups for you.

E-Business Suite Architects

Siebel Architects

PeopleSoft Architects

Share Your Application Management Ideas with Oracle at Oracle Mix

2008-09-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

When I logged onto Oracle.com this morning, I was greeted by this page. This is Oracle Mix, a new Oracle platform for connecting with the Oracle community, network, share ideas, and get answers.

I think this is a cool idea. As a product manager, one of the most important things that I have to do is to gain insights on our customers' needs. However, unlike my peers who are on the consumer side of the technology business, especially those that manage web-based products, it is a lot more difficult to conduct broad base customer research. Traditional mechanisms such as customer advisory boards, while important, can be rather slow. Oracle Mix could be a great additional tool for understanding our customer needs if it is used properly.

Here are a couple suggestions to make this an effective tool for all of us:
1. Participate. This tool is not going to work unless we all use it.
2. Give meaningful titles, use the proper tags, and associate with the right product when asking questions and making suggestions. This helps channeling your postings to the right people.
3. When proposing improvements, state the underlying problems that you need to solve.

#3 is especially important. We sometimes get enhancement requests that basically tell us to "add a knob" here or "take out something" there. While the requests may sound very specific, it could actually very hard to use the information. Different customers tend to have different ideas of solving the same problem. While it is good to hear the specific recommendations, following them blindly could lead to piecemeal product changes that undermines the integrity of the product. Therefore, it is much better to find out the underlying problems so that we can learn about the rationale behind the requests and come up with solution that address problem root causes.

Click here to access Oracle Mix.

Oracle Delivers Oracle Application Testing Suite

2008-09-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Lots of news are coming out of Oracle on the application lifecycle management front. In addition to announcing the ClearApp acquisition on 9/2 and Oracle IT Service Management Suite's PinkVERIFY certification on 9/9, Oracle also announced the availability of Oracle Application Testing Suite (ATS). With ATS, Oracle now provide tools that cover the complete application lifecycle, from development to test to production management.

Oracle Application Testing Suite is the first release of the product since it was acquired from Empirix earlier this year. Amongst many improvements is an open and integrated scripting platform for both load and functional testing. This is one of the product's key strengths, as some other competing products require users to set up separate scripts for functional and load tests, creating un-necessary rework.

In a way, ATS is not a completely new product to Oracle customers. Empirix was one of Siebel's test automation tool partners, and released one of the first tools designed specifically for managing Siebel. The latest ATS release continues this effort by providing functional and load test accelerators for Siebel. Along with Application Management Pack for Siebel, ATS is part of Oracle's complete solution for managing Siebel application lifecycle.

More information about ATS can be found here.

You may download a trial copy of ATS from Oracle Technology Network.

Oracle IT Service Management Suite Achieves PinkVERIFY Certification for ITIL Compatibility

2008-09-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

At ItSMF Fusion 2008 conference, Oracle announced that its IT Service Management Suite has been certified as ITIL compatible through Pink Elephant's PinkVERIFY IT Service Management certification program. The certification is achieved for six core ITIL processes: Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release and Service Level Management. Oracle's IT Service Management Suite is made up of Oracle Enterprise Manager, Siebel Helpdesk and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

The call to adopt more vigorous business disciplines in running IT has become louder and louder each year, and the trend can be seen in the increasing adoption of ITIL practices. In a way, running IT in a business manner and making IT decisions according to business needs should really be a no brainer. Conceptually, IT management shares many common problems with other management domains, from project management to finance to operations.

Indeed, we have seen customers applying many Oracle technologies that they use to run various business functions to manage IT. Standardizing on the same technologies helps simplifying the IT environment, leading to better economy of scale and cost savings. Furthermore, it is easier to integrate IT management processes with core business processes when the same software is used.

More information about Oracle's IT Service Management Suite can be found here.

More information about the certification can be found here.

Oracle Buys ClearApp

2008-09-02T20:40:00.000-07:00

Following the acquisitions of Moniforce, Auptuma and Empirix eTest Suite product line, Oracle announced today the acquisition of ClearApp, a supplier of application management software for composite applications. This acquisition, focusing on SOA application management, complement Oracle Enterprise Manager in creating a comprehensive application management solution to help Oracle customers achieve enhanced service levels, reduced system down-time and improved return on SOA investments.

More information about this latest acquisition can be found at www.oracle.com/ClearApp.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Application Management Preview

2008-08-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Olympics is over. The political conventions are over. What is the next mega-event? Oracle OpenWorld of course. In two weeks, we will once again pack Downtown San Francisco with tens of thousands of Oracle customers, partners and employees to talk about the latest developments in enterprise software.

We will feature our strongest lineup of breakout sessions dedicated to application management ever. Here is a preview.

E-Business Suite Management

S298395
Customer Case Study: Centrally Managing Your Oracle E-Business Suite, Using Oracle Application Management Pack
Benjamin Cabanas, General Electric, Infrastructure ; Biju Mohan, Oracle

S298399
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12: Install and Cloning Techniques Deep Dive
Max Arderius, Oracle; Biju Mohan, Oracle

S298397
Managing Oracle E-Business Suite Customizations and Patches, Using Oracle Enterprise Manager
Uma Prabhala, Oracle

S298538
Oracle E-Business Suite Management: Performance Optimization Best Practices Using Oracle Enterprise Manager
Chung Wu, Oracle

S298518
Improve Performance of Your Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel Applications with Oracle's Real User Experience Insight
Henk de Koning, Oracle; Jurgen de Leijer, Oracle

Siebel Management

S298518
Improve Performance of Your Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel Applications with Oracle's Real User Experience Insight
Henk de Koning, Oracle; Jurgen de Leijer, Oracle

S298532
Siebel Application Management: Three Steps to Better Performance and Better User Adoption
Chung Wu, Oracle

S298533
Performance Optimization Best Practices with Siebel Application Response Measurement and Oracle Enterprise Manager
Sandra Cheevers, Oracle; Chung Wu, Oracle

S300068
The Oracle Stack Promise for Siebel Customer Relationship Management: MAA, Oracle Clusterware, and Oracle Real Application Clusters
Richard Exley, Oracle; James Qiu, Oracle

PeopleSoft Management

S299070
Leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager to Manage and Monitor Your PeopleSoft Applications
Scott Schafer, Oracle

Oracle Business Intelligence Management

S298537
Oracle Business Intelligence Management: Achieving High Performance and Availability with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Amjad Afanah, Oracle; Vishal Doshi, Fiberlink Communications

General Application Management Topics

S298536
Go Beyond Web Analytics: Build Business Intelligence with Oracle Real User Experience Insight
Rajiv Taori, Oracle

S298516
How Real User Monitoring Can Improve Application Performance: Go Beyond Web Analytics and Systems Monitoring
Michel Knops, Measureworks; Mark McGill, Oracle; Jurgen de Leijer, Oracle

S298534
Application Transaction Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Key to End-to-End Monitoring virag Saksena, Oracle; Rajiv Taori, Oracle

S298524
Application Diagnostics for DBAs: Visibility into Your Application That the Middle-Tier Administrator Cannot Provide You
Shiraz Kanga, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle

S298706
Optimizing Application Performance: Application Testing Suite to the Rescue
Matthew Demeusy, Oracle; Joe Fernandes, Oracle

S298699
Application Upgrade Secrets: Avoid Surprises While Making Database Changes
Jagan Athreya, Oracle; Sandra Cheevers, Oracle; Ravi Pattabhi, Oracle

S298529
Managing Your Service Bus with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Arvind Maheshwari, Oracle

298530
Tips and Tricks for Managing Your Oracle Forms and Web Applications with Oracle Enterprise Manager
Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Richard Mertz, City of Evanston, Ill; Daniel brint, SUNY

S298519
Active User Monitoring: Measure Your User’s Experience Without Instrumenting Your Applications
Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle; Richard Mertz, City of Evanston, Ill

More details on these sessions can be found on this website: http://www28.cplan.com/cc208/catalog.jsp

See you in San Francisco!

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite 10gR4 is Available

2008-08-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite 10gR4 (version 2.0.2) is now available. This release runs on Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10.2.0.3 and 10.2.0.4, and supports the following operating system platforms:

Linux x86 and x86-64 (the same patch is applicable to both Linux-based platforms)
Solaris SPARC
AIX5L-based
HP-UX PA-RISC
HP-UX Itanium
Windows (Note: The 2.0 and 2.0.2 versions of the pack are supported on the Windows platform only with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 4.)

The pack can be used to manage the following E-Business Suite releases

Release 11.5.10 CU2 ATG PF RUP4.H
Release 12.0

This version of the pack can be downloaded immediately through Oracle Metalink, as patch 6809246. It is an OPatch rollup update on top of the pack’s earlier 10gR3 release (version 2.0). This release of the pack is the first version that is certified to run on Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 and contains a cumulative collection of bug fixes.

Additional platforms supported for Enterprise Manager 10gR4 agents

2008-07-30T08:32:00.001-07:00

Windows x64, Linux x64 and Linux Itanium based Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 agents are now available. To get them, download the Mass Agent Deployment package from OTN.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

New Application Management Pack for Siebel Customer Self Study Training Available

2008-07-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

Application Management Pack for Siebel’s eStudy is now available. The self pace online course is a tutorial for deploying, configuring and using our Siebel pack. The course assumes familiarity of base EM capabilities taught in the 5 days instructor led Enterprise Manager Grid Control training course, and complements other training that covers EM features such as Service Level Management and Configuration Management in greater depth. You may access this training at the following URL.

http://ilearning.oracle.com/ilearn/en/learner/jsp/rco_details_find.jsp?srchfor=1&rcoid=534367447

What can do I with this SARM data?

2008-07-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning finding a message in my inbox coming from an ITtoolbox subscriber asking about SARM. Wow, I thought, someone is trying to use my baby. So I replied the message over breakfast. The information may be interesting to others who want to know more about SARM, so I am re-posting it here.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I was the original product manager for SARM. Let me provide some explainations.

Back in Siebel 6, it was easy to figure out performance problems, as Siebel client ran as a Win32 program on PC, and connected directly to the database. Each user connect via a separate database session, and all the business logic ran on the client PC.

Things got a bit more complicated with Siebel 7. With the web based interface, Siebel 7 enables organizations to be more agile, as they could revise their application more easily to reflect changing business processes without pushing the software out to thousands of users. However, the architecture also placed more demand on the mid-tier servers. In addition, a single transaction request (query, save, navigation, etc...) requiring going from web browser to web server, from web server to Siebel App Server, and from Siebel App Server to database server. Connection to database could be shared via database connection pooling. Tracing transaction from the user to the database in order to identify performance bottleneck root cause became very difficult, as it was very difficult to tell which user initiated what database request, and there was no way to figure out what the mid-tier was doing. In Siebel's own IT department, everytime a performance problem occured, the IT staff would summon a couple engineers from our product development organization to figure out the problem. This was very expensive in engineering productivity, and most customers did not have this option.

In Siebel 7.5, I asked our IT operations director what we could give his staff to make life easier. The answer was a way to see what goes on inside the Siebel app server environment. SARM was born as a result.

SARM is made up of three parts. The first is the instrumentation framework. The second is the collection of instrumentation. The third is the tool for analyzing the data. SARM instrumentations are strategically placed in various parts of the Siebel software stack.

When a transaction request enters the Siebel server layer, the first timer goes off. As the request makes it way down the stack (think of it as a call graph), additional timers go off. These instrumentation points capture timing information, CPU/memory utilization, and contextual information about that instrumentation point. Data for each instrumentation point makes up a single SARM entry.

Each SARM entry includes the identification of the instrumentation point (AreaDesc). For example, the workflow engine would be one of those instrumentation points. For workflow, the application string field also stores the name of the workflow, so that you can tell not only the workflow engine is invoked, but also the particular workflow that is being run, and the amount of time spent running that workflow. User id, business component name, view name, applet names are also stored in the entries of the respective areas.

Let's say you have a transaction request that ran for 15 seconds. You want to find out the breakdown of the time spent. Using the area description and the text string, you can find out how much time is spent at each Siebel layer, and find out the exact workflow, business service or script that is causing the problem. You would know who initiated the transaction request since the user id is recorded, and which part of the application (view and applet name) the request came from.

It took a couple releases to get SARM fully done. 7.5 was the first release. Naturally, with any version 1.0 technology, there were some short comings, and there were not too many instrumentation points to capture data. In 7.7, the technology became much more mature, with better optimization to minimize overhead, and more instumentation coverage after we took a companywide effort to ask every single development team to instrument their code with SARM. 7.8 was an application functional release so SARM in 7.7 pretty much was the same in 7.7. We made further improvements in 8.0 to give administrators more ways to fine tune SARM data collection.

In addition, one thing that had been missing in SARM was a good graphical tool to analyze all the rich information. The command line tool, which was intended to convert the binary SARM data to CSV so that people could import it into spreadsheet, just didn't cut it. The reason why we didn't come up with a graphical tool initially was resource constraint. We needed to focus our energy on making sure we could collect good SARM data first and did it in an efficient way. Otherwise, the best analytical tool in the world wouldn't help.

The lack of good graphical tool also changed in the Siebel 8 timeframe. One thing that is cool about being part of Oracle is that Oracle has a lot more people. We actually have a whole division of people focusing on building management tools. So after we became part of Oracle, we shipped a graphical tool (Siebel Diagnostic Tool) as part of Application Management Pack for Siebel. In fact, we have done more to the management tooling of Siebel in the past year than the 10+ years when Siebel was an independent company. The tool is now fully integrated with Application Management Pack for Siebel, which runs as part of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR4.

I wrote about SARM on my blog in May, and will probably write about it more in the coming months, so check it out for more discussion. I will also be presenting a session on SARM at this year's OpenWorld in September so stop by if you are going to attend the conference. http://appmanagementblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/demystifying-siebel-application.html

Visit this site if you want to learn more about Application Management Pack for Siebel. http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/app_mgmt.html

Implication of $200-a-barrel Oil on Application Management

2008-06-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

I recently read this article by Bill Detwiler of TechRepublic that increasing cost for transportation will prompt more workers to work remotely, and IT organizations should prepare to support more remote workers.

I can certainly identify with this. It costs me at least $12 a day in fuel and toll to get into the office by car, up from $5 a day just a few years ago. If I do not have face-to-face meeting at the office on a particular day, I might as well work from home. To be effective, however, I need to get good response times out of the applications that I use. This need brings up the issue of managing applications for remote workers.

As I discussed in “Comparing Application Management and Traditional Systems Management”, a key thing that IT must measure in managing applications is end user experience, as it is the ultimate measurement in the operational effectiveness of an application. Managing end user experience becomes so much more challenging when part of your extended application infrastructure lives outside of your corporate network in the forms of the public Internet and your workers’ home networks.

To manage application performance for remote workers, you need to adjust the tactics that you use for monitoring end user performance. For example, since most people have Internet connections that offer asymmetric bandwidth, you have to make sure that your applications function well in the lower bandwidth environment. You might want to test application access from remote workers’ homes to make sure that response time is reasonable. You might even want to deploy synthetic test drivers from those locations or from a monitoring service provider if a significant percentage of your workers are remote.

To make it easier to isolate application performance problems caused by external networks, you should also deploy your synthetic test drivers at key WAN entry points to your internal network. If there is an application response time problem, and you are able to determine that response time is within target from your internal access points, you can isolate the problem to the external WAN more easily.

The trend toward more telecommuting is not a new thing. Increasing transportation cost just adds another motivation for people to work remotely. With increasing globalization that requires people to access applications from their home after conventional business hours in order to collaborate with colleagues half way across the world, with proliferation of readily accessible mobile computing technologies, telecommuting arrangements will continue to become more popular. IT needs to adapt its application management tactics to help make sure that remote workers continue to be productive.

Building Application Management into Your Capacity Plan

2008-06-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

One of the most common questions that I get asked when showing Oracle Enterprise Manager to customers is the amount of processing overhead the tool introduces to the environment. It is a valid concern. After all, you don't want a management tool that is supposed to help prevent performance problems to introduce new performance problems of its own. However, treating management as purely “overhead” may not be a productive way to think about the problem either.

First, let me state that it does take resource to run management tools. It takes CPU cycles, memory, disk space and I/O bandwidth to collect and process information about the health of an application environment. Since all these resources cost money, it means that it costs money to use management tools. But costs isn't the problem. It is whether you recuperate the costs through the benefits that the tools deliver. In other words, it is about return on investment.

What would be the alternative of not incurring the management costs? You would have to try managing the systems manually with no data. You would have to sit in front of the terminal yourself to watch everything to make sure things are working. If something breaks, you would have to take many guesses to try to fix the problems, which would probably take you much longer, forcing you to stay longer at work and missing other important things in life. Meanwhile, your application's availability goes down, your end users productivity are impacted, and your organization might even lose business because of that. Would you rather incur these costs over the 5% or even 10% of CPU cycles that you dedicate to running your shop properly?

So as you do capacity planning for deploying or upgrading an application, build in a capacity budget for management as well. You'll be glad you did.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 is Available on HP/UX PA-RISC

2008-05-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

EM Grid Control 10gR4 is available on HP/UX PA-RISC. With this release, 10gR4 is now available for Linux, Linux x86-64, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX Itanium and HP/UX PA-RISC. You may download them from OTN or ARU.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

Lessons from Extreme Data Center Makeover

2008-05-22T01:52:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I blogged about our OpenWorld hands-on lab set up project, which I referred as “Extreme Makeover, Data Center Edition”, as we had to set up a complex environment with a large number of complex enterprise class software in very short amount of time. It was both a fun and stressful project, and I learned a couple lessons from the exercise. I planned to blog about the lessons, but keep on postponing as other topics, from Gartner Conference to EM release to Collaborate took precedence. Well, here is a belated follow-up to the original post.

Lesson #1 – No project is too small when it comes to applying good IT practices

“How hard could setting up a demo environment be?” - that was the initial thought that came across my mind. However, it became very apparent very soon that it was a serious project with all the attributes of a real deployment. For example, after we came back from lunch on day 2 of setup, we found that one of the servers could no longer speak to the network. That was weird, as it worked just before lunch. After checking the network cable connection to the machine and agonizing all the network configuration parameters on the box, we discovered that it was actually a change that someone made on the network switch during lunch that caused the problem. We wasted half the afternoon troubleshooting. A little bit of discipline in the form of configuration management would have prevented that problem.

Lesson #2 – Be very careful about making assumptions

When we specified the hardware spec of our demo environment, we put down the usual requirements about CPU, memory, disk space, etc... What we did not specified, and assumed that we would get, were DVD drives on the server machines. We got CD-ROM drives instead, and we lost at least a day of time from this simple omission.

Lesson #3 – Expect the unexpected

A 5.6 earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area on one night while we were going to system test our client-server connection. That disrupted our work for the night as we didn't feel safe working in a mid-rise building not knowing whether there would be more shaking to come. I am not sure how to plan for something like this, but almost all projects run into “unforeseen” difficulties that are very hard to predict. In our case, there was very little that we could have done other than working longer hour the next day to make up for the lost time. If we had more time to work with at the beginning, we would have built extra buffer time into the schedule.
The examples above might seem trivial, but they introduced days of delay when their cumulative effects were added together. We managed to pull the project through thanks to hard work by the whole team, and we will have to keep these lessons in mind when we set up for the next OpenWorld or other similar projects.

Demystifying Siebel Application Response Measurement

2008-05-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

Siebel Application Response Measurement (SARM) is a performance-tracing framework that was originally introduced in Siebel 7.5. Even though the technology has existed for almost five years, it seems there are still some misconceptions about its design and intended use. Since I was the original product manager for SARM, I guess I can try to offer some explanations.

Myth #1 – SARM is Siebel ARM

Back was Siebel was an independent company, our strategy to provide Siebel management tools was to instrument the Siebel platform and work with 3rd party ISVs to adapt their tools to work with Siebel. As part of this strategy, we thought it would be a good thing to try to comply with industry standards such as Application Response Measurement (ARM) so that tools that support ARM can be used to monitor and diagnostic Siebel performance. Therefore, it is possible to consume SARM data by using an ARM-compliant tool.

However, strictly speaking, SARM is not an implementation of ARM. The problem with standards is that they often have to sacrifice capabilities for compatibility and provide the lowest common denominator solution. We found that ARM, specifically ARM 2.0, was not rich enough to capture Siebel-specific performance data. As a result, we built SARM to capture a superset of the information, and pass a subset of that to the ARM API. Specifically, contextual information such as the names of the Siebel UI views, business components, workflow processes and scripts are not passed through the ARM API, which would make it a bit difficult to tell what goes on in processing transaction requests.

In other words, to fully take advantage of the rich information captured by SARM, you need a tool that processes the native SARM data stream.

Myth #2 – SARM has high overhead

The driver behind SARM was the need for a way to identify transaction request performance bottlenecks, especially for interactive user workload. It used to be rather strict-forward to do this in the Siebel 2000 (version 6) days, as Siebel applications were deployed with 2-tier client/server topologies, with direct connections from clients to the database. In Siebel 7, the topology became truly multi-tiered, and with database connection pooling, there was no deterministic way to tie a database transaction to the user request. SARM was intended to be the remedy by providing a way to trace transaction request throughout the Siebel mid-tier.

As a performance management tool, the last thing that we needed was having SARM introduce more performance problems. Consequently, we were obsessed in squeezing every last bit of performance out of the tool and making its overhead as low as possible. This was achieved through several means:
- Record timing information while doing as little secondary processing as possible in real-time
- Use highly optimized buffered I/O to persist performance data
- Provide various throttling mechanisms to control the amount of SARM data captured

Prior to releasing SARM, we ran SARM through numerous load-testing scenarios. For example, in the Call Center 1 load tests, which simulated hundreds of simultaneous users running against a single Siebel app server, we observed SARM overhead to be less than 3%, well within our product performance requirement. We thought this was a reasonable cost to realize the benefit of having good management data for optimizing the application.

Myth #3 – SARM is only for production diagnostics

While a lot of the initial discussions about SARM were for performance diagnostics, we have always intended SARM to be a framework that supports the full set of application performance lifecycle activities.

SARM really is just a set of timers that measure the timing of transaction requests, as well as the timing within various points in the “call graph” of the Siebel software stack for processing the requests. SARM doesn’t care whether the timing came from actual user operations while the application is live or from activities generated from pre-production load tests. While in production, the data that it captures can be used for day-to-day monitoring as well as diagnostics, as well as longer-range capacity management.

Steps to Fusion - Centralize the Management of Your Applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager

2008-05-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

eWeek recently reviewed Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4. In the article, Cameron Sturdevant referred Enterprise Manager as “a high-powered ecosystem management platform that uses its home field advantage in Oracle shops to provide administrators with top-notch tools”. He went on to say that he recommends “administrators [to] consider a management strategy that brings Enterprise Manager in over time to take care of Oracle databases, application servers, web applications from Oracle and its fleet of acquired products from PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards and others.”

Wow, “home field advantage” . . . never thought of this metaphor when we planned our products, but it is the right idea. It is safe to say that Oracle, more than any other vendor, cares about whether customers can properly manage Oracle products, be they database, middleware or applications. They are all parts of our home field. It is also safe to say that Oracle, more than any other vendor, possesses the domain expertise for managing Oracle products. We built all these software in the first place, so we know how they work really well and we can build tools for managing them properly.

Oracle has made quite a bit of progress in solidifying its application management portfolio in the past 18 months. This started with the release of three application management packs that are designed specifically for managing Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel. It continued with the introduction of Application Diagnostics for Java, acquisition of Moniforce for end user monitoring, acquisition of the e-Test product suite from Empirix for application functional and load testing and release of Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4, which included, amongst many things, improved service level management, SOA management, data masking, and a new management pack for Oracle Business Intelligence applications.

So what do all these development means if you are an Oracle application customer? It means you now have a new set of fantastic option to consider when acquiring tools for managing your application, as these Enterprise Manager tools cover everything from configuration management to monitoring to diagnostics to pre-production testing, and they are designed specifically for managing Oracle application products. It also means that you have one fewer set of vendor to deal with by choosing these tools from Oracle.

In addition, you would have taken the first step to Fusion from an IT operations management perspective by centralizing the management of your applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager today. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the tool for managing Fusion Middleware, the foundation for Fusion Applications. Since all these technologies may be managed through Oracle Enterprise Manager, it means that you may evolve your IT management setups incrementally as your modernize your application environments through products such as WebCenter, Business Intelligence and Oracle Application Integration Architecture.

Let's consider the following example with Siebel CRM for front office and Oracle E-Business Suite for back office. At the beginning, you manage these two applications separately using the bundled tools.

Step #1 is to connect these applications to Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control using Application Management Pack for Siebel and Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, respectively. You gain advanced monitoring, centralized event management, configuration management, transaction diagnostic for Siebel, advanced cloning automation for E-Business Suite, end user monitoring and service level management.

For step #2, you decide to connect Siebel with E-Business Suite so that orders captured in Siebel could be submitted into E-Business Suite for fulfillment. You deploy Oracle Process Integration Pack for Order-to-Cash, running the integration processes on Oracle SOA Suite. For management, activate SOA Management Pack on the same Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control instance. You may now manage both Siebel and E-Business Suite, along with the integration between the two applications as a single logical system.

For step #3, you want to expose information to your users in a unified portal using Oracle WebCenter, and provide business insights using data from both front and back office systems using Oracle Business Intelligence. As you deploy these products, activate Oracle Middleware Management Packs and Oracle Business Intelligence Management Pack on the same Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control environment, and manage these Fusion middleware components along with Siebel, E-Business Suite, and SOA Suite as a single logical system.

Fusion Applications arrive, and in step #4, you decide that you want to start uptaking these new functionalities and run the new applications along with your existing Siebel and E-Business Suite applications. No problem, just add Fusion Applications to the same Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and you may then use it to manage your Siebel, E-Business Suite, SOA Suite, WebCenter, Business Intelligence, and Fusion Applications as a single logical system.

As you can see, as you evolve your application environment to meet your changing business needs, one thing may remain constant – the tool for managing your applications, as it evolves with you. This approach provides continuity for your IT operations while at the same time give you access to a comprehensive set of tools designed specifically for your application environment. Sounds good? Let's take your first step today.

p.s.: These diagrams came from the slide deck that I used at Collaborate. You may find the full presentation on the conference CD.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 is Available on AIX

2008-05-07T12:52:00.001-07:00

EM Grid Control 10gR4 is available on AIX 5L. You may download it from OTN or ARU.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Registration is Now Open

2008-04-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is now open for registration. This year's event will be taking place quite a bit earlier from September 21-25 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

We have already started planning the breakout sessions. If there is any particular topic on Oracle Enterprise Manager and application management that you want us to cover, leave us a comment.

You may find out more about the event here: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/index.html

Link to registration page: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/registration.html

See you in San Francisco in September!

Updated Oracle Maintenance Wizard for E-Business Suite

2008-04-24T12:35:00.002-07:00

Oracle Maintenance Wizard 2.10, which provides step-by-step guidance for maintenance and upgrade tasks, is available. Enhancements include:

- A new, more secured encryption method
- Updates to Upgrade Assistance 12 that takes you directly to 12.0.4 in one upgrade
- Additional automation and bug fixes

Upgrade paths now included in the Maintenance Wizard are:
- 10.7 -> 11.5.10.2 (via the Upgrade Assistant 11.5.10)
- 11.0.3 -> 11.5.10.2 (via the Upgrade Assistant 11.5.10)
- 11.5.3+ -> 11.5.10.2 (via the Maintenance Pack Assistant 11.5.10)
- 11.5.8+ -> 12.0.4 (via the Upgrade Assistant 12)
- RDBMS 8i -> 10g (via the Database Assistant 10g)
- RDBMS 9i -> 10g (via the Database Assistant 10g)

You need to start using this version of the tool if you are still on the older (v1.x) release, as 1.x versions are already de-supported.

For more information on the Maintenance Wizard, review note 215527.1 (login required). For information on training for the Maintenance Wizard, review note 418301.1 (login required).

Comparing Application Management and Traditional Systems Management

2008-04-18T01:05:00.000-07:00

Collaborate 2008 is over. Presenting at Collaborate was a different experience from presenting at OpenWorld. OpenWorld was an Oracle's show, so I had to worry about a bunch of logistics of putting things together. On the other hand, Collaborate was run by our customers. I just had to show up, present, attend a couple sessions myself, party, and speak with people, which I seemed to have more time to do at this event.

In one of the conversations, a question came up on the difference between application management and traditional systems management. I thought this may be an interesting topic for readers of this blog, so I am going to share that discussion with you.

Gartner Group defines application management as the monitoring, diagnostic, tuning, administration and configuration of packaged and custom applications. This seems to make sense. Application Management is about the management of, well, applications. But what is an application, and how does the management of an application different from managing other IT components?

An application helps end users accomplish a specific task. Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and the custom Jave EE-based software that you write, are all examples of applications, since end users can use these tools directly to perform to day to day work. Oracle RDBMS and Oracle Applications Server are not applications since end users typically do not write SQL statements, or Java code on run on these infrastructure software. Therefore, application management must be about managing these end user visible software, right? Yes, but not so simple.

Consider this. The performance and availability of a modern distributed application, whether it is written in Java EE, .NET, or integrated application stacks such as those provided by Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne are determined not only by the application layer, but also the middleware, database, operating systems, network, and storage layers. Successful management of applications therefore call for a holistic approach of managing the entire environment that supports the application.

In addition, because applications are used by end users in support of business activities, it is very important to manage applications according to business requirements and potential impact to business operations. This means defining performance and availability requirement according to the particular tasks that end users perform. In other words, application management needs to be done from the top-down, from the top where the end users are down to the bottom of the technology stack. This is rather different from the traditional systems management, in which the approach was much more bottom-up, and the focus is much more on the health of the individual components. It also means a whole new set of information to track, such as the activities that users perform on the applications and the experience that they get out of the applications.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 is Available on Linux x86-64 and HP/UX Itanium

2008-04-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

Linux x86-64 and HP/UX Itanium ports of EM Grid Control 10gR4 is out. You may download it from OTN or ARU.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite is Available on HP/UX

2008-04-11T01:37:00.000-07:00

The first update to Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite is now available for HP/UX PA-RISC as well as Itanium in addition to the other O/S platforms that the pack support. You need Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR3 (10.2.0.3) to run this pack, and you may download it through Metalink as patch 5489352.

The pack extends Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage Oracle E-Business Suite systems. It supports E-Business Suite R11i (requires 11.5.10 ATG RUP4) and R12. Key capabilities include service level management, application performance management, configuration management, and automation of cloning processes.

I will be covering this pack in my breakout session at Collaborate next week and at the Enterprise Manager demo booth at the Oracle demoground.

Step to Fusion – Centralize the Managing of Your Current Oracle Applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager
Wednesday, 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Drop by if you are at the conference. See you in Denver!

Six New Monitoring Plug-in's Are Available for Oracle Enterprise Manager

2008-04-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

Oracle just announced the availability of six new system monitoring plug-in's to extend Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control's ability to monitor third party applications and technologies. These plug-in's support two commonly used applications - Microsoft Exchange and SAP R/3. They also cover infrastructure technologies such as EMC CLARiiON, VMware ESX, Apache Tomcat, and Sybase Adaptive Server.

You may notice that many of these are products that compete against Oracle products. What's even more interesting is that five of these six plug-in's were developed by Oracle. You may ask, why would Oracle want to invest resource managing other company's products? The reason is simple. These are all technologies used in conjunction with Oracle products. In order for Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide a holistic view on the health of Oracle products, it needs to cover the adjacent technologies that are integrated with Oracle products as well. Unlike another infrastructure software vendor whose heterogeneous management strategy is to rely primarily on partners to do the work, Oracle has taken a much more hands on approach by investing its own resource.

Collaborate 2008 Preview

2008-04-04T18:13:00.000-07:00

Collaborate 2008 is coming to Denver, Colorado in just over two weeks. For those of you who haven't attended the event, Collaborate is the combined annual conference of the three major independent Oracle user groups –IOUG (International Oracle User Group), OAUG (Oracle Application User Group), and Quest (PeopleSoft User Group). Contrary to what an IT trade magazine journalist recently reported, the Oracle community is alive and well. The early word is that the user group expects over 7,000 people attending the event. That's a double digit increase in attendence compared to last year, and quite a feat to pull off in this economy.

Oracle will be a guest at the event, and we have numerous sessions planned around manageability of various Oracle applications and technologies. Here is a preview.

Top-Down Application Management – Oracle's Blueprint for Managing Applications from the Business Perspectives
Monday, 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Application Chanage Management and Masking for DBAs
Monday, 9:15-10:15 a.m.

Performance Diagnostic and Tuning Best Practices: What DBAs Must Know about Managing DB Performance
Tuesday, 3:30-4:30 p.m.

Improving IT Operations: Automated Provisioning and Patching, and Managing Configurations of Oracle Fusion Middleware Deployments
Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.-9:30 a.m.

Fool-Proof and Fast Track Strategies for a Successful Upgrade: Database Replay, DBUA and More
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-noon

Step to Fusion – Centralize the Managing of Your Current Oracle Applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager
Wednesday, 4:30-5:30 p.m.

With the exception of the last session “Step to Fusion”, all the sessions are listed under the IOUG conference agenda. “Step to Fusion” is listed under the OAUG agenda.

The “Step to Fusion” session is targeted for people who run Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle E-Business Suite applications. We will cover how you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage these applications today, and discuss the roadmap for evolving your application management toolset to facilitate your eventual adoption of Fusion technologies.

See you in Denver!

Oracle Acquires e-TEST from Empirix

2008-03-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Oracle announced this morning that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the e-TEST suite products from Empirix. This follows the acquisition of Moniforce, a maker of end user monitoring products, in December 2007. e-TEST is made up of three components: e-Load for scalability, performance and load testing, e-Tester for automated functional and regression testing, and e-Manager Enterprise, for test process management, including test requirements management, test management, test execution and defect tracking. The combination of e-TEST suite and Oracle Enterprise Manager is expected to create a best-of-breed application management portfolio spanning the entire application life cycle, from development and testing to production deployment and application performance management.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10gR4 is Available on Solaris

2008-03-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

Solaris port of EM Grid Control 10gR4 is out. You may download it from OTN or ARU.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

It will be posted to eDelivery shortly as well.

First Update to Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Available

2008-02-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

The first update of Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite is now available. This is an OPatch rollup update on top of the original release. This update contains bug fixes in the areas of cloning and also supports management of some of Oracle E-Business Suite advanced topologies.

The key fixes / capabilities include:

Cloning
- 6141071: Ability for user to choose custom directories for installing APPL_TOP and DB TOP while cloning EBS R12.
- 5976900: Ability for users to perform scale up or scale down clone of DB TOP.
- 6155177: Ability for clone to support the capability to skip optional steps specified in the Clone Procedure.
- 5876590: Support cloning of Individual EBS components (Database Techstack, Data Top, Application Techstack, and Application Top).
- 5892625: Ability to apply an EBS image on an existing E-Business Suite Target.
Discovery

Command Line Interface (CLI) for discovering and registering E-Business Suite system. In addition to the EM Grid Control User Interface based EBS discovery process, you can now choose to discover using CLI. However the discovery mechanism still remains the same in both the steps.

Certified Oracle E-Business Suite Topology
- EBS deployed on shared file system (NFS): Customers can now use Application Management Pack to monitor and manage Oracle E-Business Suite systems deployed on a shared file system. However the cloning capability is still pending certification.
- SSL enabled EBS System: Using this updated Application Management Pack, you can monitor and manage Oracle E-Business Suite systems that are SSL enabled.

This pack is available through Oracle Metalink, as patch 5969524. It requires Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR3 (10.2.0.3).

Best Practices for Active Response Time Monitoring

2008-01-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

At OpenWorld, I was asked about the proper way to set up synthetic transactions for monitoring applications. It was a good question, and I wanted to document my answer in some sort of whitepaper or technote. So far I still haven't gotten around to writing the formal document, so I am going just post it on this blog. Perhaps I could evolve this into the actual document.

As I discussed in the post “Response Time Monitoring - Real User vs. Synthetic”, there is a place for both real user and synthetic monitoring of applications. There are several challenges in using synthetic transactions, however, and these challenges are not unique to Oracle Enterprise Manager. You would have to consider them no matter which tool you use.

First, unless carefully designed, the tests may not be representative of actual end user activities, reducing the usefulness of the measurements. Therefore, you must be very careful in defining those tests. It would be a good idea to sit down with real users to observe how they use the applications. If the application has not been launched, work with the developers, or if there is one, the UI interaction designer to define the flow. In addition, work with your business sponsors to understand where the application will be used and the distribution of user population. You would want to place your synthetic test drivers at locations where it is important to measure user experience.

Second, some synthetic transactions are very hard to create and may introduce noise into business data. While it is usually relatively easy to create query-based synthetic transactions, it is much harder to create transactions that create or update data. For example, if synthetic transactions are to test for successful checkouts on an e-commerce website, the tests must be constructed carefully so that the test orders are not mis-categorized as actual orders.

To mitigate these potential problems, you should set up dedicated test account(s) to make it easier to tell whether something running on the application came from real users or the synthetic tests. For operations that involve changing data, determine ways to exclude those data from your reports. If it is possible, look for ways to purge the test data out of the system. It is not always possible or easy to do this, as some business processes do not allow changes to data after a certain point. If you are working with a custom application, consider building a “test mode” into the application to make it easier to roll back changes.

Third, security and authorization policies might impact the tests as well. You need to make sure that whatever test application user account has the proper access privilege to access the application elements to be tested. If authorization policies change, you need to verify to make sure that the tests are not affected. The same kind of consideration applies to passwords as well. If you are required to change passwords due to password aging policies, you need to make sure that those changes are reflected in your test setup.

Fourth, synthetic tests may introduce load into your application, so be judicious when setting up test frequency to avoid overloading your application. This means that you may not want to just use all your functional or load test scripts for production monitoring. These scripts were created for different purposes – testing functionality, and stress testing the application, and they may be an overkill for what you need to do to just test the application enough so that you can tell whether key operations are working.

Lastly, make sure your monitoring scripts log out of the application at the end of execution. This is especially important for applications that maintain some sort of session state on the mid-tier. If you do not log out, the resources would not be freed up in a timely manner, and this may impact the scalability of the application. By the same token, be sure to allocate resource to account for test connections on top of connections made by regular users.

Response Time Monitoring - Real User vs. Synthetic

2008-01-08T23:31:00.000-08:00

Response time monitoring is a very important aspect of application management. In a way, it is nothing new. People have been monitoring response time ever since the days of green screen mainframe terminal applications. The only variable is the technologies involved, both on the application and the tools for monitoring them.

When I speak with customers, I sometimes get these questions about the pros and cons of monitoring response times of real user vs. synthetic transactions, also referred as passive vs. active monitoring, and whether one approach should be used over the other. The truth is both approaches are relevant and they complement each other. Here's why.

Real user monitoring is obviously important because it measures the actual experience of actual end users. Despite of its appeal, however, it is not a one size fits all solution to measure the performance of an application. First, there can be a lot of noise in the actual end user response time data, which may make it difficult to determine the relative performance of an application over time. Usage pattern can vary a lot at different times, and the performance of transaction requests can vary a lot depending on the data that are processed. Consequently, we may end up with a lot of apple vs. oranges when trying to compare response time measurements. Second, real user monitoring only works only when there are real users on the system. For example, if there is no end user on the system at 2 a.m., data collected from real user monitoring won't tell if the application is working or not.

On the other hand, synthetic transactions can be used even when real users are not around. Because the tests are well defined and their executions are controlled, it is also easier to do long term trending analysis to see if application performance has improved or degraded over time. Synthetic transactions do have their own shortcomings, however. First, unless carefully designed, the tests may not be representative of actual end user activities, reducing the usefulness of the measurements. Second, some synthetic transactions are very hard to create and may introduce noise into business data. While it is usually relatively easy to create query-based synthetic transactions, it is much harder to create transactions that create or update data. For example, if synthetic transactions are to test for successful checkouts on an e-commerce website, the tests must be constructed carefully so that the test orders are not mis-categorized as actual orders.

As you can see, there are tradeoffs to both approaches, which are complementary. It is not real user vs. synthetic, it should be real user and synthetic.

Virtualization, Green IT and Application Management

2007-12-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

Besides sessions run by Gartner analysts, there were also many vendor presentations at the conference. The hot topics this year seemed to be virtualization and green IT.

In polls conducted at the conference, the majority of the participants indicated that they were already using virtualization technologies at their organizations. So in a way, virtualization was not a brand new topic. What were interesting were some of the spins that vendors put into virtualization. In fact, one of the vendor went as far as calling remote application access “display virtualization”, as it separates the box where the application is run, from the terminal device where the application is displayed.

Wow, by that definition, X Windows, VNC or even the web browser are really virtualization technologies. Hmm...

It may be cool to be able to display an application remotely, and it is certainly very, very good to be able to utilize hardware more efficiently, take snapshot and rollback system images, and migrate running systems. However, I think the truly exciting possibilities in virtualization are with the ways that it can change application management. For example, one of the biggest headaches in managing applications is deployment, as it can be pretty challenging to make sure that the application can co-exist with all the other software that run on the box. A certified virtual machine image that includes the application can go a long way in reducing that complexity.

In terms of green IT, IBM pointed out that many organizations are already spending close to 30% of their energy budget on running IT, and the figure is going up. The interesting thing is that using energy efficient CPUs only reduces overall energy consumption by 2%. Other practices, such as locating data centers closer to energy sources, cooling system redesigns, and turning on servers only when needed to handle workload, can have much greater impacts on energy consumption and energy costs. Supporting these green IT practices require more dynamic software that can be activated and deactivated with ease, and even greater emphasis on capacity management. For example, electricity costs may become a new parameter to consider when scheduling batch jobs.

Oracle Acquires Moniforce

2007-12-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Moniforce, a leading vendor for end user experience monitoring. Using its product, UXinsight, one could monitor the actual end user response time of applications, usage trends, and whether users experience any problems. These are all critical information that helps IT professionals determine whether their applications are delivering the service level demanded by their businesses. The UXinsight technology augments other end user monitoring tools that are already available in Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Establishing, Enforcing, and Marketing SLAs

2007-12-06T22:38:00.000-08:00

Another presentation that I attended at the Gartner conference was David Coyle's session on “Establishing, Enforcing and Marketing SLAs.”

He started the session by asking how many service level agreements (SLAs) were established at organizations represented by the audience. 74% of the participants reported that their organizations have at least one SLAs established, and 15% have over 20 SLAs. This result was fairly consistent with a survey that we conducted at OpenWorld. Over half of the respondents in our survey also indicated that they are using SLAs at their organizations.

The question, however, is how many of these are formal SLAs, and whether these organizations can guarantee the delivery of the SLAs. According to Gartner's model, an organization has to be at level 3 maturity or higher in order to be able to have high confidence in achieving SLAs. This is because many of the supportive service delivery and service support processes need to be in place first.

Even though an organization may not be ready to fully deliver the terms of an SLA, it doesn't mean it should not be done. SLAs are important because they help drive continuous improvements by providing targets to aim for, and they help IT communicate the values delivered. In fact, David Coyle argued that regular, formal service level review meetings should be used to highlight successes.

In terms of enforcement, the key is to make sure that there are proper rewards and penalties to drive behavior. The leading organizations even link IT staff bonuses to SLA attainment. This kind of practice is still rather rare, and it was confirmed by a participant poll that only a small percentage of organizations represented at the conference had this sort of policy. Still, linking performance to compensation makes a lot of sense as long as the system is implemented carefully.

Gartner Maturity Model

2007-12-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

I attended Gartner Data Center Conference this week. Since the show was held in Las Vegas, it presents a bit of a dilemma for bloggers like me, as the unwritten rule for Las Vegas is “what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.” Well, I found a couple of the discussions interesting, so I am going to talk about them anyways.

The first session that I attended was Donna Scott and Jay Pultz' keynote on the Gartner Maturity Model. The concept of a maturity model is not a new thing. Models such as Software Engineering Institute's CMMI have been around for many years. What's interesting about the Gartner model is that it focuses specifically on IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) practices and it covers not only process assessment, but also organization, human resource and business management assessments.

The model classifies I&O maturity into 6 levels:
0. survival – no defined I&O practices
1. awareness – has dedicated resources for I&O
2. committed – has sufficient resources, but mostly operating in reactive mode; attempts to define informal operational level agreements
3. proactive – be able to forecast demands of various IT services and provision capacity accordingly
4. service aligned – formal service level agreement defined; organization has capabilities to achieve the formal service level targets
5. business partners – IT is capable of proactively suggest using technologies to transform organizations and bring new products and services to market

The model contains some pretty detailed classification criterion. I am not going into the details of them, since there is too much information to write on a blog and Gartner probably won't want me to give away the whole thing. Call Gartner if you want the details.

The most interesting part of the session was the live audience poll, in which the audience was asked to provide quick self assessments of where their organizations stand according to the maturity model. The overall distribution was fairly close to a bell curve but with a bit more concentration at the lower levels. Only 4 percent of the participants rated their organizations to be at level 4 or above.

I think the point about these maturity models is not necessary the specific details and the classification criteria. One could argue all day whether something should fall under level 2 or 3. The importance of these models is that they provide yardsticks to assess how organizations improve over time. For example, Gartner estimates that by 2012, 14% of large IT organizations would be at level 4 or above. We will see if this prediction comes true.

Does your organization use a maturity model to drive improvements? What sort of experience have you had in using them?

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Presentations and Product Information are Available

2007-11-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 presentations are available for downloading. Click here for sessions related to Enterprise Management, and here for the general content catalog.

Use cboracle / oraclec6 to sign in.

You may also download product collateral by clicking here.

Images of Oracle OpenWorld 2007

2007-11-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

I originally planned to post photos during the show by organizing the shots on the BART ride home each night. Well, I didn't pull that off, so I edited all of them this past weekend. Here are some images from the conference.

http://www.flickr.com/gp/18122152@N07/2H4546

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 4

2007-11-16T21:38:00.000-08:00

Today was the last day of OpenWorld 2007. The last day of most conference is usually a slower time, and OpenWorld was no exception. There was no keynote, and we saw lighter traffic at the DEMOground. That said, there were still quite a bit of activities in breakout sessions and hands-on labs (we were both amazed and delighted that people showed up to the 8:30 a.m. SOA management lab after the main customer party last night), and we had several quality conversations with customers.

These conversations pointed to a couple common issues. For example, several customers asked us about the proper enablement of the Siebel Application Response Measurement (SARM) framework for collecting performance data. Others asked about the best practices for defining service tests. Both examples indicate that there are gaps between our products' capabilities and our customers' understanding on how to best utilize them.

The above examples are just some of the topics that I plan to cover in the coming months. Now that OpenWorld is over, I am going to return to my regularly scheduled program of talking exclusively about application management. I will cover several categories of topics: application management practices, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and specific issues for managing packaged Oracle applications.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 3

2007-11-15T02:26:00.000-08:00

Michael Dell and Larry Ellison gave their keynote today. Dell is a hardware systems company, so the talk naturally revolved around "boxes". One thing that I found interesting was that there was a very heavy emphasis on power consumption. Yes, I am aware of the power wattage and cooling problem, but I guess I haven't really spent extensive time thinking about it. In his speech, he even got to the details of how Dell's simplified packaging helps save a couple trees. I then started thinking - does application management have anything to do with preserving the environment? Hmm... Maybe. Maybe if we could tune the application better and utilize resource more efficiently, we would need fewer boxes. Need to think about this more.

During Larry's keynote, he reiterated that Oracle expects customers to adopt Fusion Applications at their own timeframe, and they could very well be running Fusion Applications side-by-side with existing applications during a multi-year transition period. This is the assumption that we have built into our appication management strategy. We want to enable customers to centralize the management of their existing applications on Oracle Enterprise Manager, plug in new Fusion components as they become available so that these components can be managed together with the older apps, and eventually retire their older applications and the management of these apps on Enterprise Manager.

I had Meet the Expert session immediately following the keynote, and one of the customers asked what needs to be done to prepare for Fusion Applications. There are really multiple dimensions to this questions. The general answer is to consider augenting existing applications using Fusion Middleware technologies that are available today to fulfill business requirements not met in the current applications. These Fusion Middleware components may include SOA, WebCenter, BI, Identify & Access Management, etc... From the application IT operationals perspective, it means planning ahead to manage all these new components together with the existing application, which is something that Oracle Enterprise Manager is designed to do.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 2

2007-11-13T23:54:00.000-08:00

Thomas Kurian started off this morning with a keynote showing a preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, the platform for our next generation Fusion Applications. On the Oracle Enterprise Manager front, we announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 4.

10gR4 has quite a few exciting features that are geared toward application administrators. They include an upgraded and integrated transaction diagnostic tool for Siebel applications, an enhanced service test beacon for web-based applications, Application Diagnostic for Java (AD4J), integrated configuration management for SOA management, a new management pack for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI-EE) and more. I will cover each of them in more detail in future postings.

As for my day, I spent most of the time at a customer lunch, a customer advisory board meeting, and the Enterprise Manager customer party. Basically, today was about listening to customer's feedbacks.

One of the notable discussions today was Campbell Webb's presentation on how Oracle IT uses Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage our IT infrastructure and applications. Customers always seem to be curious on how we use our own software internally, so his presentation generated quite a bit of interests. Working with our internal IT and OnDemand organization has become an integral part of our development process for many Oracle Enterprise Manager products. Oracle, being a pretty good size organization, provides a rather good test bed for validating our software. On top of that, we have engaged administrators in Oracle IT early in the product cycle to help design products and review our product plans. We hope that this "design for administrators by administrators" approach would result in better products.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 1

2007-11-12T22:57:00.000-08:00

Charles Philips and Chuck Rozwat kicked off Day 1 of OpenWorld this morning with their joint keynote. One of the demonstrations that they presented was using Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage the integration of Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Process Integration Pack (PIP). In the demonstration, metrics collected by Oracle Enterprise Manager showed that E-Business Suite was not keeping up with orders submitted by Siebel because of inadequate database capacity. To correct the problem, Oracle Enterprise Manager's Database Provisioning Pack was used to add another node to the RAC cluster. This scenario really showed off Oracle Enterprise Manager's ability to manage the complete portfolio of Oracle software that many of our customers have. We have been talking about building a demo like this for the better part of last year, so it is really cool to see it come together.

On my own neck of the wood, OpenWorld really got started with the opening of DEMOground. That went fine. The real fun for the day was to head over to Marriotts to find out whether our hands-on lab equipment worked as we planned. That went fine too. Capacity utilization came way below our load test scenario. We probably had over-engineered this thing. Next came my session at 3 p.m. Would people show up? Well, they did. :) The PeopleSoft Management Pack session presented by my colleague Scott Schafer had good attendance as well, so OpenWorld was off to a good start for our application management products.

My talk was titled “Siebel Application Management - Tools, Tips and Techniques to Ensure Performance and Availability”. The key message of the presentation was:

1. Application Management is a process.
2. It covers all stages of an application's lifecycle.
3. Implementing the process properly, with the right tool, would increase the chance of success with application deployment.

I just got the presentation uploaded to the conference content management system, and I will be blogging more about the details of this presentation in the coming weeks and months. It has been a big long day. I am going to go to bed early so that I can get to Thomas Kurian's keynote in person tomorrow morning.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day 0

2007-11-11T23:23:00.000-08:00

10:32 - at Moscone South Room 102

This is the absolutely final demopod staff orientation meeting. Usual staff - reminders of no eating at booth, no email, no Internet surfing, make sure we scan people badges... No leather pants!? Now that's something new that I haven't heard before.

11:20 - at Marriotts Golden Gate Room

Now we'll find out whether our "Extreme Data Center Makeover" was successful. Turn on all the boxes. Good, everything comes on. Why is box #6 not responding? Oh, the network port is not lighting up. We got a bad port. Tried another port and it worked. Wait, some boxes are connecting to box #9 but not #1. What is going on? Routing table not set up properly on box #1. How did we miss this one? Anyway, look like all the servers are working, but some of the PCs are not picking up IP address from DHCP servers. Network admins called. Let's hope they fix it.

15:29 - at Moscone West Oracle Speaker Lounge

We are now less than 2 hours away from Larry/Safra's Sunday Night Keynote.
Just checked out the demopods and they are good to go.

18:50 - at Moscone North Keynote Hall

Well, the keynote was interesting. Every company has a human side story behind it, and Oracle is of no exception. Larry recounted many of the war stories of the early days, from how he convinced Bob Miner to start Software Development Labs, which later became Oracle, to selling relational database software to the CIA (before development got started of course), to getting his house foreclosed on when they were running out of money and had to cut his salary, to his first encounter with financial statements. The rather chaotic really made me wonder how the company became the success of what it is today. Amazing.

Got to head out to grab a bite to eat, go home, and get ready for tomorrow. It's showtime!
CNET also has a blog entry on the keynote - http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9814858-7.html?tag=head

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day -1

2007-11-11T01:04:00.000-08:00

Day minus 1 – Are we ready? I think we are.

Alright, got to finish the demo today. I need to create a transaction bottleneck in the application in order to show off our transaction diagnostic tool. How do I put a sleep/wait statement in Javascript? What? There is no sleep/wait statement in Javascript. Great! Let's google for a workaround. Found it. It works.

Latest Status

Hands-on Lab Material – still need to get it to Kinkos; drop it off tomorrow on route to Moscone

Demos – done :)

1 day to go before it starts. 5 days to go before it ends.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day -2

2007-11-11T00:58:00.000-08:00

Day minus 2 – Are we ready? Really close.

Whew, only 2 demo staff members did not register. I guess we will have to smuggle them onto the DEMOground somehow. We had our final staff meeting during lunchtime to go through all the logistics – what to say, what to wear / not to wear, schedule, transportation, etc... It was a big meeting, as this OpenWorld is going to involve over 100 people just from the Enterprise Manager team. We totally ran out of food, which usually doesn't happen at lunch meetings.

Latest Status

Hands-on Lab Material – done; just need to get it to Kinkos

Demos – still working on it; will be done by Monday :)

2 days to go before it starts. 6 days to go before it ends.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Day -3

2007-11-09T00:14:00.001-08:00

I posted a message about our OpenWorld lab preparation, and someone replied with a question for more information, so I guess maybe some of you are interested to see what it takes to put OpenWorld together. One of my fellow PMs compared OpenWorld to the Super Bowl. Seems about right. Both require a ton of preparations. I will try to give a little bit of the behind the scene look from my own corner at Oracle.

Day minus 3 – Are we ready? Well, almost.

Hands-on Lab Equipment Preparation – check

Hands-on Lab Material – 1 done, 1 to go; where is the nearest Kinkos to Moscone?

Presentations – check

Demos – still working on it; will be done by Monday :)

Send customer party invites – check

Set up customer meetings – check

Set up partner meetings – check

Arrange meet the expert session – check

Arrange staff for demopods – check; oh, is everyone on this list registered?

Pick up my badge – check; wait, am I registered to be a speaker and DEMOground staff, or just speaker? What is this Employee Standard vs. Employee Plus pass anyway?

3 days to go before it starts. 7 days to go before it ends.

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Application Management Preview

2007-11-06T19:50:00.001-08:00

OpenWorld is once again around the corner. This year's event once again promises to be even bigger than last year's. If you are an application administrator or IT manager, here are several activities that may be of special interest to you:

Presentation Sessions

S291919 - Top Down Application Management – Oracle's Blueprint for Managing from a Business Perspective (Moscone West, 2001 - L2, Rajiv Taori, 12:30-1:30 p.m.)

S291922 - Siebel Application Management: Tools, Tips, and Techniques to Ensure Performance and Availability (Moscone West 2001 - L2, Chung Wu, 3:15-4:15 p.m.)

S290704 - Case Study: Managing Oracle E-Business Suite, Using Enterprise Manager Pack (Moscone West 2014 - L2, Biju Mohan, 11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

S292003 - Enterprise Manager Application Management Pack for PeopleSoft Deep Dive (Moscone West 2012 - L2, Scott Schafer, 4:45-15:45 p.m.)

S291921 - End-User Monitoring: The Ultimate Judge of Application Performance and Availability (Moscone West 2001 - L2, Rajiv Taori, 9:45-10:45 a.m.)

S291924 - SOA Management: Runtime Governance of Your Composite Application Environment (Moscone West 2001 - L2, Nadu Bharadwaj, 4:30-5:30 p.m.)

S291925 - A New Approach to Diagnosing Java Application Performance (Moscone West 2001 - L2, Rajagopal Marripalli, 3:00-4:00 p.m.)

Meet the Expert Session – Informal Meetings with Product Staff

Application Management – All Apps (Moscone West Lookout #2) – 2:30-5:30 p.m.

Oracle E-Business Suite (Moscone West Lookout #2) – 1:30-3:30 p.m.

Visit this website for more details – http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/application-lounge.html

Demos

Moscone South

J4 – Application Performance Management / Service Level Management

D8, J7 – Application Management

J8 – SOA Management

B48 – Oracle E-Business Suite Management

Moscone West

P13 – PeopleSoft Management

Refer to this document for more details – http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/focus/focus-on-enterprise-management.pdf

Extreme Makeover, Data Center Edition

2007-11-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

I was a part-time NetWare administrator in my first job out of college. Since then, I have moved on and worked as a developer and product manager. This past two weeks, however, all the memories of my first job came back to life when I was asked to help set up our OpenWorld hands-on lab environment.

The task was equivalent to an Extreme Makeover, Data Center Edition. In less than two weeks, we had to transform a collection of 10 “bare metal” servers into the equivalent of a mini-data center, complete with 85 client workstations. We had to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, and Oracle Enterprise Manager into the environment.

Even though this project was really about setting up equipment for a training lab, we ran into the same kind of challenges that administrators face on a daily basis. First, there was the schedule. OpenWorld starts on 11/11, and it would start whether our environment was ready or not, so that target date ain't moving. On the other hand, our hardware arrived one week late! So we were way behind schedule before we even got started.

Second, we didn't get the hardware we expect to get. The vendor provided us with CD-ROM drives in our servers, and we had DVD media for our software. These are some of the latest multi-core Dell server boxes. Putting CD-ROM drives in these boxes is like putting cassette tape deck into a brand new Mercedes Benz! The CD-ROM media that we ended up getting was also the wrong one – 32 bit instead of 64 bit, and we didn't find out until we called in a developer to figure out why we could not run E-Business Suite's RapidInstall. These mismatches wasted some of our time, which we could not afford to lose.

Third, there was the unforeseen situation. A 5.6 earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area on one night while we were going to system test our client-server connection. That disrupted our work for the night as we didn't feel safe working in a mid-rise building not knowing whether there would be more shaking to come. More time was lost.

Oh yeah, we ran into some “unintended features” in our software as well.

These are just a couple of the server, network and software problems we ran into. The actual list is quite a bit longer than this. Let me put it this way, I feel your pain as administrators.
I did learn a few things from this experience, and I will cover them in a follow up post.

Introduction to Application Management Blog

2007-11-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Application Management blog. My name is Chung Wu, and I work at Oracle Corporation. I want to use this blog as a way for me to share what I have learned about managing applications through my professional work, talk about recent developments, and solicit your ideas and feedback. Since this is the first installment of the blog, and there seems to be varying definitions on Application Management, I am going to begin by first defining what I mean by Application Management and making the case on why it is important. If you agree or disagree with the points that I made, let me know. I want your feedback.

Application Management is the discipline within systems management that focus on managing the availability, performance, security, deployment, change and configuration of applications. It is a specific class of management discipline because of the unique demands that applications place, which cannot be met by traditional server, network and storage management.

Application Management is critical because applications are the first line of contact between end-users and the computing infrastructure. When a problem occurs, the first place that end-users see the problem usually is the application. For example, an application that freezes up may be caused by a lost of network connection to the database, yet the end-user may only see it as the applications' problem.

Furthermore, Application Management is critical because applications are critical. As people rely on applications to accomplish their tasks, and more and more business processes are getting digitized, application problems reduce people's productivity and may even lead to direct lost of business. For example, if an eCommerce application that acts as the online storefront of a retailer goes down, customers may switch to another vendor to make the purchase, resulting in lost of business for the retailer.

Since there are different classes of applications, the specific application management problems for a particular application differ as well. For example, for desktop applications such as OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Photoshop, deployment may mean getting the physical files of the software packaged copied onto each of the PC and run their installers to get them properly registered with the operating environment. On the other hand, deployment of a web browser-based Enterprise Business Application such as Siebel CRM may entail distributing the Siebel server software on a cluster of servers, installing the schema of the application on a client/server database, and moving all the customizations that are stored in files and database from development/test environment to production environment. The client PCs that not touched at all during deployment, since the application is delivered to end-users via a web-browser.For now, I shall focus this blog on managing Enterprise Applications that typically come with a multi-tiered architecture.

Before I conclude, I also need to (Oracle's lawyers made me to :-) ) make a disclaimer about this blog - The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. I also provide no warranty, guarantee, explicit nor implied, now or in the future, etc... etc... yade yeda ya... Read my stuff at own your risk. You get the idea. ;-)