The OMS is the brain of the entire Grid Control product. It provides all the
functionality spoken in the context of Grid Control thus far. It is also responsible for managing all the communications with the Grid Control Agents. As an example, if an agent is uploading a large amount of data or is very slow to respond, it can disable the agent and indicate the same to the configured set of IT staff. The OMS is developed as a J2EE application and is deployed on the WebLogic server. The installation creates a WebLogic domain with an admin server and a managed server. The OMS application is deployed on the dedicated managed server.
The console application provides the necessary UI pages for the IT staff to interact with the Grid Control product.
Target modeling
Any enterprise IT infrastructure contains numerous disparate components that are geographically distributed across various data centers. These components include both hardware components such as servers hosting different applications, network switches, routers, storage devices, and so on, as well as software components such as operating systems, database servers, application servers, middleware components, packaged applications, distributed applications, and so on. Although these components exhibit various management traits and expose multiple
management operations, they also have certain common attributes that need to be monitored by the IT administrators. For instance, the performance characteristics of an Oracle database instance are completely different from those of an Oracle WebLogic managed server. However, both these components still exhibit a common trait of indicating their health or current state. This indicates if the corresponding component functions are available or not. The components themselves and the management of both their common and dissimilar traits form the building blocks of the IT infrastructure management. Each of these components is a monitor-able entity and is represented as a target in OEM. A target represents any component that is managed by OEM. Targets are the fundamental building blocks, on which the different systems management capabilities of OEM are built upon.
Continuing with our travel portal example, each of the components within the travel portal is represented as targets within OEM. These include the Oracle database targets, Oracle WebLogic server targets, the host targets on which these run, and so on. Other than the physical hosts, OEM 11g does not support the management of physical hardware such as network routers, switches, and so on. Hence, a discussion on the management support for those components is beyond the scope of this book.
OEM categorizes targets primarily based on the type of the component that they represent. This classification based on the type of the component is known as a Target Type. The targets are first classified based on the component type and subsequently based on the vendor type. The kind of target types depends on the flavor of OEM that is used to manage the target, while target specific flavors such as OEM Database Control and OEM Fusion Middleware Control support only database and middleware components to be modeled within their respective consoles. OEM Grid Control provides a wider canvas to support multiple target types within the same console. OEM Grid Control supports all manageable products from the Oracle product family as well as certain popular products within each target type from other vendors. The different kinds of target types supported by OEM Grid Control include:
Hosttargets: These represent the physical boxes of hosts that run different products such as databases, application servers, and so on.
Databasetargets: These represent the various database server instances that run within the enterprise such as Oracle database instance targets, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) targets, and so on.
Middlewaretargets: These represent the various middleware components such as Oracle WebLogic servers, domains, clusters, Oracle application servers (OC4J), service oriented architecture (SOA) components and composites, Oracle coherence server, and Oracle Identity Management (IDM) components. Middleware servers from other vendors such as IBM Websphere Application Server (WAS) and, JBoss Application Server are also supported.
Applicationtargets: These model various applications such as custom J2EE applications deployed on various application servers, packaged applications such as Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle E-biz Suite, other functional applications such as Oracle Business Intelligence products like OBIEE, Oracle Beehive, and so on.
Compositetargets: These include logical target types that provide business abstraction such as systems, groups, and service targets.
OMStargets: These model the OEM itself as a target. OEM provides Monitor-the-Monitor (MTM) capability and is represented as OMS and repository targets within.
Chapter 2
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The following image is a screenshot of OEM Grid Control and displays a small subset of the large number of target types supported by OEM Grid Control. This page is referred to as the All Targets page within OEM Grid Control.
The user can navigate to this page by first clicking on the Targets link in the global tab and then subsequently clicking on the All Targets link within the subtab. This page displays all the targets configured within an enterprise. It also displays the current status of the target as well as the corresponding target type.
In any enterprise, there are numerous IT components deployed to support various business functions. The AllTargets page has a search feature that helps to filter the targets displayed based on either the target type or target name. In addition, the OEM Grid Control also provides quick filters based on key target types such as databases, middleware components, services, and so on. These quick filters can be viewed by clicking on the Targets link in the main tab and then clicking on the respective filter links within the subtab.