This flavor of OEM works at the enterprise level and primarily focuses on managing the entire Oracle grid of products. It works one step above the DB Control and the FMW Control flavor of OEM. While these two flavors look at each installation, Grid Control looks at the entire enterprise as a whole. The Grid Control flavor of OEM can manage the entire enterprise grid and covers most of the Oracle product suites.
Apart from this it also comes with out-of-the-box support for some non-Oracle product suites. The Grid Control architecture is extensible by design, and allows third-party vendors and distributors to add support for newer products.
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These third-party extensions are known as OEM Grid Control Management plugins. Such a model enables external vendors and integrators to add to the breadth of products whose management is supported by OEM Grid Control.
As OEM operates at the enterprise level, it can provide a richer set of models to support mapping business functions and IT operations. At the same time, it can seamlessly link into the individual product controls as required by the administrators. As an example, consider the travel portal. With DB and AS control, while we can certainly monitor each middleware and database server, we cannot configure a perspective that shows the relevant IT infrastructure that is used to provide the portal function. However, by introducing Grid Control we can build this perspective as it has visibility into all the components of the IT infrastructure. At the same time, in case a change is required in the configuration of the database, it has built-in capabilities to navigate to the relevant page in the corresponding DB Control.
Another important distinction is that the Grid Control variety of OEM comes with its own repository where all the model and target data is stored. This repository is also used to store the performance metrics. This implies that Grid Control can provide views and trends of the performance of any component or a composite model. This enables the administrator to get a sense of the system performance on both a real-time and historical basis. By having snapshots of historical configuration and behavior, administrators can also compare these snapshots. In combination with the system and service models, this provides the administrator with a valuable tool to link business service behavior with configuration changes. As an example, consider that end users are reporting a sudden drop in performance on Monday morning as compared to the past Friday. The service administrator knows that there was a maintenance window scheduled during the weekend, but doesn't know what parameters were changed. Using Grid Control the administrator can now compare the current configuration with the snapshot taken on Friday prior to the maintenance. If the comparison shows that database sort cache size was (inadvertently) reduced, the service administrator in conjunction with the DBA can immediately correct this and restore the service to normal levels.
OEM Grid Control provides the following key features:
Data center level visibility: As it resides and operates at a higher level, it provides insight into the entire data center by providing a comprehensive view.
Enterprise availability view: Provides an enterprise-level view of the targets that are currently up or down or in any other state.
Incident management: Provides an enterprise-level view of the various critical and warning alerts as well as policy violations.
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Business modeling paradigms: Provides a richer set of modeling paradigms that enable the IT staff to map business functions to the underlying IT infrastructure.
Historical data and comparisons: As it comes with its own repository for data storage, it exposes historical views from which trends can be derived.
It also allows comparison of data from two different times thus enabling the mapping of service behavior with underlying changes to IT configuration.
Scheduling of jobs: Using Grid Control administrators can schedule
mundane operations such as running scripts and target stop starts. Based on the schedule these operations will automatically be run on the right set of targets. The status of these operations can be tracked independently at a later stage.
Data center inventory: Most often overlooked, but an important feature of Grid Control is the ability to provide the IT staff with an inventory of the components deployed within the data center. This eliminates the need to maintain complex sheets to track components and their locations.
Provisioning new components: Grid Control allows the creation and maintenance of a gold image of the configuration of supported products.
These images can then be used to automatically provision new systems in the data center.
Information publishing using reports: Grid Control provides extensive reporting capabilities around the targets configured. This is supplemented by many out-of-the-box report templates that can be applied on targets to automatically publish information related to it. These reports can also be scheduled and e-mailed to the relevant IT staff.
Always on monitoring: The architecture of Grid Control enables it to be always on and monitoring the enterprise grid. Rules can be set throughout the product to identify problems and alert the concerned IT staff based on the targets.
As the features related to BSM are provided by this flavor, the remainder of this book will focus primarily on OEM Grid Control.
More information is available at the official OEM Grid Control website at:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/grid-control/
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The subsequent sections of this book will rely heavily upon screenshots from OEM Grid Control as a tool to explain the relevant functionality and guide the reader into setting up models to manage business functions and services.