Overview of Groups

Groups enable you to collectively monitor and administer many targets as a single logical unit. For example, you can define a group to contain all the databases serving an enterprise application, and define another group to contain all the hosts in a host farm. You can then use these groups to perform administrative operations. To create a group, you can manually select and add the members of the group. If you add an aggregate target, such as a Cluster Database, all of its member targets are automatically added to the group.

A group can include targets of the same type, such as all your production databases, or it could include all the targets on a host which would be comprised of different target types. You can nest static groups inside each other. In the target selector when you are selecting group members, choose Group as the target type, or choose a parent group as part of the process of creating a group.

If a system target is added to a group, it automatically pulls in its member targets. This could be the case of a regular group where a system such as WebLogic Server is added and also pulls in its members, or in a dynamic group where you specify a Target type to be an Oracle WebLogic Server and it also pulls in members of the WebLogic Server even though it does not match the dynamic group criteria. In this scenario, the group operations (for example, runnning jobs, blackouts, and so on) apply to all members of the group.

Note:

Because the Enterprise Manager Repository is a member of the OMS and the Enterprise Manager Repository is a RAC database, the ASMs and listeners are added as group members as well.

You can also check the member relationships of any target by navigating to the target home page. From the <target> menu, select Members—>Topology—>View: System Members

After you configure a group, you can perform various administrative operations, such as:

  • View a summary status of the targets within the group.

  • View a roll-up of member statuses and open incidents for members of the group.

  • View a summary of critical patch advisories.

  • View configuration changes during the past 7 days.

  • Create jobs and view the status of job executions.

  • Create blackouts and view the status of current blackouts.