Power at Your Fingertips –Overlooked Gems in Oracle EM

1. Power at Your Fingertips –Overlooked Gems in Oracle EM John Sheaffer Principal Sales Consultant – Oracle Corporation

2. Survey • How many people in the audience • Use EM Grid Control in their Day-to-Day activities to perform their job? • Approx 60% of the audience raised their hands • Are planning or evaluating EM Grid Control? • Approx the remaining 40% raised their hands

3. Motivation for this presentation • Not a comprehensive EM overview/demo • Attempting to highlight very useful features that are often overlooked • These are some of my personal favorites • Not a comprehensive list

4. EM Pack License Awareness • Some of these Gems are features of EM Packs • Which do require a separate license • I will call these out during the presentation • And have included a slide at the end as a reference

5. Gem Categories • DB Performance • ASH Report • Graphical Explain Plan • Monitoring & Alerting • Monitoring Templates • Problem Resolution • Root Cause Analysis • Change Management – Baselines & Comparisons • Support Workbench • Automation • Multi-task Jobs

6. DB Performance Gems

7. ASH Report • Similar to AWR Report but can be run on any time range • Not just between 1 hour snapshots • Combines the data in AWR with ASH • Great for documenting spikes, or other anomalous workload

8. Demonstration

14. Graphical Execution Plan • Easy to interpret for complex queries • Requires SVG support in your browser

15. Demonstration

17. Monitoring & Alerting Gem

18. Monitoring Templates • Capture metric & policy thresholds – apply to multiple targets • Directly edit the Monitoring Template to make changes once – then re­apply

19. Demonstration

23. Problem Resolution Gems

24. Root­cause Analysis • Let EM guide you to the Root-Cause • If the Test fails or is slow, EM will evaluate open Alerts in the System and recommend a Root-Cause

25. Demonstration

28. Root­cause Analysis How to set up: • Define a System as a group of targets • DB, host, listener, etc • Define a Service to represent what that System does • E.g. Loan Application Service • Create a Service Test to test the Service • E.g. Log on to web application, step through application, cancel before submitting

29. Config Mgmt – Search & Compare • Quickly answer questions about Host / DB / App Svr configuration • Such As: • How is the unreliable server’s O/S different from our stable server’s configuration? • There’s an exploit on an O/S package (i.e. vsftp, etc). Which servers have this vulnerable package? • How does the production server differ from our IT Gold Standard Image? • This server was reliable, but now it’s crashing. What has changed in the past 3 days?

34. Change Mgmt - Baselines & Comparisons • Record and Track changes to DB Schemas • Tables, Indexes, View definitions, etc • PL/SQL • User account definitions, grants, etc • DB initialization parameters • Baseline = Snaphot • Comparison = Diff

35. Change Mgmt - Baselines & Comparisons • Use Cases: • Identify changes made by App upgrades • Track optimizations made to PL/SQL code • Identify customizations made by 3rd parties • Capture the result of constant tuning/optimizations • Prove to auditors that no changes occurred since last audit • Answer: What has changed since last (XYZ)

50. Support Workbench • Available on 11g Databases • 11g DB automatically tracks Incidents (errors) and Problems (series of errors) • Uses the Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) • Use Support Workbench to: • Quickly identify (and view) the related trace files • Quickly Package the trace files for submission to Oracle Support • Track the SR# in Support Workbench with its associated Problem Entry