Enterprise Manager Management Focus Areas

This section provides brief descriptions of the following management focus areas:

Framework and Infrastructure

Enterprise Manager is a critical tool for data center management. It has a framework that is secure, scalable, and highly available. With a next-generation user interface, it provides a rich, intuitive console that can be customized to suit different roles. Enterprise Manager framework also has advanced capabilities such as self-update where key components such as target plug-ins, compliance policies, and deployment procedures can be updated automatically as newer versions become available.

Enterprise Manager framework is enterprise-ready and is designed to manage and monitor critical business operations to ensure smooth running of enterprise data centers.

Enterprise Monitoring

World class enterprise monitoring is about monitoring the status of your infrastructure and applications, notifying the appropriate IT staff when incidents occur, and reporting on status, history, and trends to interested parties throughout IT and the business. Enterprise Manager provides rich monitoring features as a foundation for monitoring all components of your IT infrastructure (Oracle and non-Oracle) as well as the applications and services that are running on them. These features enable IT to proactively monitor and resolve issues by business priority, implement operational best practices for monitoring, and provide consistent, high quality service in support of business goals.

Application Management

Oracle provides advanced, out-of-the-box application management solutions for applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, and Peoplesoft. They provide end-to-end, integrated application monitoring and management capabilities, resulting in improved availability, predictability, and reliability. Enterprise Manager's management capabilities include user experience management, performance management, change and configuration management, patching, provisioning, testing, integrated diagnostics, and automatic tuning.

Enterprise Manager also offers advanced management capabilities for managing custom applications, integrations, and extensions.

Database Management

Enterprise Manager is the premier tool for managing your Oracle Database environment.

Database management involves the monitoring, administration, and maintenance of the databases and database groups in your enterprise and with Enterprise Manager you receive:

  • A complete set of integrated features for managing Oracle Database, which enables you to:
    • Perform day-to-day tasks and run repetitive jobs
    • Detect problems and use the available guided resolution workflows
  • Unparalleled scalability that lets you manage a single database or thousands of instances.
  • An intuitive management product that leads the industry in ease of deployment and use.

Enterprise Manager supports the management of Oracle Database Standard Edition One, Oracle Database Standard Edition, and Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. However, you must have the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition to use the entire breadth of database management features that Enterprise Manager provides with the following management packs:

  • Oracle Diagnostics Pack
  • Oracle Tuning Pack
  • Oracle Database Lifecycle Management Pack
  • Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting Pack
  • Oracle Real Application Testing
  • Exadata Management Pack
  • Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance Management Pack
  • Legacy: Configuration Management Pack for Oracle Database
  • Legacy: Change Management Pack for Oracle Database
  • Legacy: Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack for Oracle Database

For information on generic Enterprise Manager and Oracle Database concepts, see:

The following sections provide information on some of the Database Management capabilities provided by Enterprise Manager with links to more information:

Database Administration

Using Enterprise Manager you can keep your Oracle Databases available and running efficiently.

You can use the available administration tools to manage database objects and initiate database operations inside an Oracle Database.

The following list provides some of the database administration tasks you can perform:

  • Allocate system storage and plan future storage requirements.
  • Use Oracle Scheduler to control when and where various tasks occur in the database environment.
  • Migrate your database storage to use Oracle Automatic Storage Management.
  • Use Database Resource Manager to control the distribution of resources among various sessions by controlling the execution schedule inside the database.
  • Create and manage primary database objects such as tables, views, and indexes.
  • Perform administration tasks for Oracle XML DB, such as viewing or editing parameters for the Oracle XML DB configuration file.
  • Create, manage, and perform specific actions against materialized views, which are schema objects that can be used to summarize, compute, replicate, and distribute data.

For detailed information, see:

Database Maintenance

Enterprise Manager provides functions to maintain Oracle Databases.

The following list provides some of the database maintenance tasks you can perform:

  • Use backup and recovery features such as:
    • Physical backup and recovery that is built on Oracle’s Recovery Manager (RMAN) command-line client.
    • Complete or point-in-time media recovery.
    • Flashback recovery, which provides a range of physical and logical data recovery tools as efficient, easy-to-use alternatives to physical and logical backups.
  • Configure Oracle Data Guard and use its comprehensive capabilities to manage and monitor primary and standby databases.
  • Use the Transport Tablespaces wizard to copy a set of tablespaces from one Oracle Database to another.
  • Monitor Oracle Real Application Clusters.
  • Use the Database High Availability (HA) console to monitor database HA.
  • Use the Database Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Advisor page to view recommended Oracle solutions for outage types such as computer failures, storage failures, and human errors.

For detailed information, see:

Database Performance Management

Enterprise Manager offers a comprehensive database performance management solution, which includes real-time and automatic performance diagnostics and monitoring capabilities.

This solution comes as a part of the Oracle Diagnostics and Oracle Tuning packs, which enable you to identify the problem areas in your database environment and use the tuning capabilities to tune your database’s performance.

The following list provides some of the performance management tasks you can perform:

  • Monitor database health and performance, analyze the workloads running against the database, and identify issues.
  • Use the Performance Hub to view the Active Session History (ASH) analytics, monitored SQL statement data for a specified time period.
  • Detect and diagnose performance issues automatically using Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM).
  • Use Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and automate database statistics gathering by collecting, processing, and maintaining performance statistics for database problem detection and self-tuning purposes.
  • Use the following tuning advisors to examine a SQL statement or set of statements and determine how to address issues and optimize database performance:
    • SQL Tuning Advisor
    • SQL Access Advisor
  • Use the following Real Application Testing components to perform real-world testing of your Oracle Database:
    • SQL Performance Analyzer
    • Database Replay

For detailed information, see:

Database Security Management

Enterprise Manager provides security features to protect data and control how a database is accessed and used.

The following list provides some of the database security tasks you can perform:

  • Restrict user access to data using flexible database access control and fine-grained privilege control.
  • Manage database users and authorizations in one location using the Enterprise user security feature.
  • Use Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to automatically encrypt data when it is written to the database and automatically decrypt data when accessed.
  • Use Oracle Label Security (OLS) to classify data and control access using security labels.
  • Use Virtual Private Database (VPD) to enforce data access at the row and column level, using security conditions to protect the data.
  • Use Oracle Database Vault for strong security controls to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information by privileged users and protect against unintended changes to the database.
  • Use data redaction to protect data by presenting a masked version of the data to non-privileged users. The masked version of the data pre‐serves the format and referential integrity of the data, so any application that uses the data continues to work as expected.
  • Use Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting (DMS) to discover sensitive data, mask the data with fictitious yet realistic looking data and subset the data based on specific conditions, ensuring secure and efficient use in non-production environments.

For detailed information, see:

Database Lifecycle Management

Enterprise Manager provides a full database lifecycle management solution with its Database Lifecycle Management Pack.

This solution provides complete lifecycle management for Oracle Databases deployed on an on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environment, and includes:

  • Automated discovery of assets
  • Fleet maintenance for patching and upgrades
  • Database configuration and compliance management
  • Schema change management
  • Hybrid cloud management

For detailed information, see:

Middleware Management

Enterprise Manager provides a comprehensive management solution for Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and non-Oracle middleware technologies. Oracle's offering encompasses out-of-the-box availability and performance monitoring, robust diagnostics, administration, and lifecycle management that includes configuration and compliance management as well as provisioning and patching across middleware software such as:

  • WebLogic Server

  • Coherence

  • Identity Management

  • WebCenter

  • Web Tier

  • Non-Oracle Middleware (for example, JBoss Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server)

Hardware and Virtualization Management

Enterprise Manager provides an integrated and cost-effective solution for complete physical and virtual server lifecycle management. By delivering comprehensive provisioning, patching, monitoring, administration, and configuration management capabilities through a web-based user interface, Enterprise Manager significantly reduces the complexity and cost associated with managing Oracle VM, Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating system environments. In addition, enterprises using Oracle Sun hardware can obtain deep insight into their server, storage, and network infrastructure layers and manage thousands of systems in a scalable manner. Enterprise Manager helps customers to accelerate the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing to optimize IT resources, improve hardware utilization, streamline IT processes, and reduce costs. Enterprise Manager is integrated with OVM 3.0 and higher.

Heterogeneous (Non-Oracle) Management

Enterprise Manager, besides being the best suite of management products for Oracle technologies, also provides a comprehensive solution for the management of heterogeneous data centers (including Microsoft SQL Server and JBoss Application Server) through its rich collection of extensions known as plug-ins and connectors. The Self Update mechanism in Enterprise Manager enables customers to download /import and deploy extensions built by Oracle, Oracle's numerous partners, and customers themselves. These extensions are built upon the same management framework that is used for Oracle products, and therefore provides the same level of stability and richness as the Oracle products.

For more information, see Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange.

Cloud Management

Enterprise cloud presents new management challenges. With a move to virtualization, a top benefit expected from private cloud adoption is cost savings through standardization for operational efficiency. However, without proper management capabilities, expected economic benefits of cloud computing will not be realized.

Enterprise Manager is Oracle's complete cloud lifecycle management solution. It is the industry's first complete solution including self-service provisioning balanced against centralized, policy-based resource management, integrated chargeback, and capacity planning, and complete visibility of the physical and virtual environment from applications to disk.

For more information, see Cloud Management in Oracle Enterprise Manager Licensing Information User Manual.

Hybrid Cloud Management

With Hybrid Cloud Management, Enterprise Manager provides you with a "single pane of glass" for monitoring and managing on-premise as well as Oracle Cloud deployments, all from the same management console. By deploying Hybrid Cloud Agents onto the Oracle Cloud virtual hosts serving your Oracle Cloud services, you are able to manage Oracle Cloud targets just as you would any other. The communication between Management Agents and your on-premise Oracle Management Service instances is secure from external interference. In addition to a hardened architecture of its own, Enterprise Manager supports the use of additional external HTTP proxies that support tunneling, which can be configured to connect to the Oracle Cloud.

Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive solution that helps database, system, and application administrators automate the processes required to manage the lifecycle of Oracle technology. It eliminates manual and time-consuming tasks related to discovery, initial provisioning, patching, configuration management, and ongoing change management. In addition, the solution provides compliance frameworks for reporting and managing industry and regulatory compliance standards. Finally, all of the on-premise instrumentation can be connected in real-time to My Oracle Support for complete communication between Oracle and customers.

Application Performance Management

Enterprise Manager provides a complete Application Performance Management (APM) solution for custom applications and Oracle applications. The APM solution is designed for both cloud and enterprise data center deployments and is supported on Oracle and non-Oracle platforms.

Oracle APM delivers Business Driven Application Management with end-to-end monitoring that includes:

  • User Experience Management

  • Java monitoring and diagnostics

  • Multi-layer discovery of infrastructure and application topology

  • Rich reporting and analytic capabilities on real user activities and transaction monitoring data

Application Quality Management

Oracle's Application Quality Management products provide a complete testing solution for Oracle Database, Oracle Packaged Applications, and custom Web applications.

  • Infrastructure Testing: Real Application Testing enables realistic, production-scale testing of the database infrastructure. It uses real, production workloads to generate load against databases under test and does not require any script development or maintenance. With Real Application Testing you can reduce your testing time by more than 80%. It provides the most efficient, optimized and highest quality testing for validating database infrastructure changes.

  • Test Data Management: Oracle Test Data Management and Data Masking provide efficient, automated, and secure test system creation capabilities for Oracle and non-Oracle databases, with out-of-the-box templates for Oracle packaged applications.