Service targets in OEM Grid Control are a class of targets that provide a functional perspective of the IT infrastructure with a business-centric focus. As described in Chapter 1, a service model allows the administrator to manage the IT infrastructure viewed through a business service dimension. It also provides vital information related to the various business functions such as availability, performance, and service-levels.
Chapter 2
[ 63 ]
The service targets can be configured based on two different paradigms of the same business function:
Services Based on System: These are service targets that provide a direct mapping of business functions to the underlying IT infrastructure. These give the administrators a perspective of how the various targets influence the normal functioning and the service-levels of a business function.
These services rely on the passive monitoring capabilities within OEM Grid Control.
Services Based on Service Test: These are service targets that are modeled based on an end user's perspective of the various business functions provided by an enterprise. These service targets are configured levering active monitoring paradigm using various service tests that execute the different synthetic transactions from modules in different locations known as beacons. These beacons run from the relevant geographical locations.
This provides a black box view of the business service and its performance characteristics as perceived by the real end users.
The travel portal provides various business services such as flight search, car rental services, and so on to the end users. It also consumes the payment gateway services from various business partners. The IT staff requires both a customer view as well as infrastructure-oriented view of the business function. In the case of the flight search, the business function is modeled as a service target named FlightSearchWebSite, that is, based on the end user's perspective. Hence, this service is configured, based on service tests that run various synthetic, but relevant web transactions running from various beacons. These beacons are deployed in different locations such as New York, Singapore, and Tokyo representing the geographical locations of the key customer base. The car rental business flows are modeled as a service named CarRentalService and provide the mapping of business function with the IT infrastructure. So, this is configured as service target based on the underlying system—travel portal car rental system. To recall, the travel portal car rental system was created as a system comprising the heterogeneous targets that provide the car rental business functions.
The OEM Grid Control provides out-of-the-box models for four different types of service targets. These models represent the most frequently used paradigms across different enterprises in the visualization of various business functions. The four service target types supported out-of-the-box in OEM Grid Control are:
Web Application: These are service target types that model the business services provided by various web applications.
Forms Application: These are target types that model the various business functions provided by an Oracle Forms application.
•
•
•
•
Generic Service: These are service target types that allow the administrator to model any standard business service within an enterprise.
Aggregate Service: These are composite service target types that are defined by combining logically related business services together.
The following image is a screenshot of OEM Grid Control and shows a listing of all the service targets that are modeled. This specific page is known as All Service Targets page.
The user can navigate to this page by first clicking on the Targets link in the global tab followed by clicking on the Services link in the subtab. The All Service Targets page displays all the service targets that have been created within OEM Grid Control. This shows the service targets as well the corresponding target types. For service targets that are modeled based on system targets, the corresponding system target is displayed. It also indicates the summary information of the member targets within the system and their alerts. For the service targets defined using service tests, this page displays the summary information of the service tests and the alerts as well as the beacons executing these synthetic transactions.
A key difference between the service targets and the group/system targets is that the former represents a business function, while the latter is a logical collection. In OEM Grid Control service, targets have characteristics such as availability, performance, and usage metrics, while system and group targets are modeled as a collection of targets.
•
•
Chapter 2
[ 65 ]
In the travel portal illustration, this page shows the different service targets configured such as:
CarRentalService: It is modeled as a Generic Service target based on the TravelPortal-CarRental-System
FlightSearchWebSite: It is modeled as a Web Application service based on a Service Test from two different beacons
PaymentGatewayService: It is modeled as a Forms Application based on the PaymentGatewaySystem
TravelPortalSearchServices: It is modeled as an Aggregate Service
comprising the CarRentalService and FlightSearchWebSite service targets The All Service Targets page provides a drill down into each of the respective service targets. Clicking on any of the service targets navigates the user to the home page of the corresponding service target. The subsequent chapters will cover the creation, configuration, and monitoring capabilities of various kinds of service target types in greater length.
The All Service Targets page has a search feature that helps to filter the targets displayed based on target name. In addition, the OEM Grid Control also provides quick filters based on the key service target type—
Web Application. This quick filter can be viewed by clicking on the Targets link in the main tab and then clicking on the Web Application link within the subtab.