Customizing Administrator’s Access To view Specific Targets (WebLogic) in Enterprise Manager

I got some queries about viewing specific targets from EM Grid Control. For example, you manage/monitor several targets such as databases, application servers, applications, etc from your Grid Control environment and there are different administrators for each of the targets. As an administrator you are responsible for only few targets. For example you are only responsible for few WebLogic servers and you want to view/monitor only those targets from Grid Control. How do you do that?

It’s simple - you have to create a user that has access to only the targets you are interested. Thankfully Grid Control provides role-based access control that you can use for this purpose. Let me assume that you want to create a user named weblogic that has access to only few WebLogic servers and let me walk you thru how to achieve this.

Create an EM user and assign Targets

1. Logon as a super administrator and create a user named weblogic and at step 4 of the user creation, select the targets the users should have access to.

2. You can assign specific privileges on the target e.g. Operator, Full or Viewer as shown below.

3. After you logon as weblogic user and you will see that home page for weblogic users only shows only the number of targets this user has privileges.

Grid Control will show only the Weblogic Servers that the user has privileges.

Customizing the data you want to view

Also as an administrator you want to customize the above view. Click on Customize Table Columns link under the Related Links section and you will get the following screen:

Select the columns/data that you wanted to view and click OK and you will get a customized view as follows:

Hope this helps!

Middleware Management Sessions at Oracle Open World

We’ve several sessions and Hands on demo lab this year at Oracle World 2008, San Francisco. Here are the details for the technical sessions:

Session ID	Session Title	Speaker(s)	Date/Time	Venue/Room
Technical Sessions
S298520	Best Practices for Managing Your Oracle WebLogic Environment with Oracle Enterprise Manager	Debu Panda, Oracle; Sandeep Pandita, Oracle	Monday 09/22/2008 11:30 - 12:30	Moscone West Rm 2006
S298524	Application Diagnostics for DBAs: Visibility into Your Application That the Middle-Tier Administrator Cannot Provide You	Shiraz Kanga, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle	Monday 09/22/2008 11:30 - 12:30	Moscone West Rm 2003
S298526	Speed Oracle WebLogic Administration with Oracle Enterprise Manager Configuration Management and Lifecycle Automation	Rahul Goyal, Oracle; Arvind Maheshwari, Oracle; Madhave Sathe, Oracle	Monday 09/22/2008 11:30 - 12:30	Moscone West Rm 2008
S298528	Five Steps to Better SOA Governance with Oracle Enterprise Manager	Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Mohan Udyavar, Wipro; Sheng-te Yang, Edmunds	Monday 09/22/2008 11:30 - 12:30	Moscone South Rm 302
S298531	Three Things You Should Know About Managing Your Identity Management Suite With Oracle Enterprise Manager	Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle	Monday 09/22/2008 14:30 - 15:30	Moscone West Rm 2003
S298525	Diagnosing Java Application Issues in Production: Gaining Performance Insight That Even Developers Do Not Have	Shiraz Kanga, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle	Wednesday 09/24/2008 09:00 - 10:00	Moscone West Rm 2001
S298529	Managing Your Service Bus with Oracle Enterprise Manager	Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Arvind Maheshwari, Oracle	Wednesday 09/24/2008 17:00 - 18:00	Moscone West Rm 2003
S298536	Go Beyond Web Analytics: Build Business Intelligence with Oracle Real User Experience Insight	Rajiv Taori, Oracle	Thursday 09/25/2008 09:00 - 10:00	Moscone West Rm 2001
S298534	Application Transaction Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Key to End-to-End Monitoring	Virag Saksena, Oracle; Rajiv Taori, Oracle	Thursday 09/25/2008 10:30 - 11:30	Moscone West Rm 2001
S298537	Oracle Business Intelligence Management: Achieving High Performance and Availability with Oracle Enterprise Manager	Amjad Afanah, Oracle; Vishal Doshi, Fiberlink Communications	Thursday 09/25/2008 12:00 - 13:00	Moscone West Rm 2001
S298522	Top Five Things DBAs Must Know About Managing Middleware	Rakesh Dhoopar, Oracle; Debu Panda, Oracle	Thursday 09/25/2008 15:00 - 16:00	Moscone West Rm 2003

Also we have hands-on session on SOA Management with Grid Control and Java application diagnostics with Oracle AD4J.

Session ID	Session Title	Speaker(s)	Date/Time	Venue/Room
Hands-on Labs
S300236	Oracle Enterprise Manager Hands-on Lab: SOA Management and Java Application Diagnostics	Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Prasad Kona, oracle; Dean Margolese, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle; Will Scelzo, Oracle; Rajiv Taori, Oracle; brian hengen, oracle	Monday 09/22/2008 13:00 - 14:00	Marriott Golden Gate B3
S300236	Oracle Enterprise Manager Hands-on Lab: SOA Management and Java Application Diagnostics	Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Prasad Kona, oracle; Dean Margolese, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle; Will Scelzo, Oracle; Rajiv Taori, Oracle; brian hengen, oracle	Tuesday 09/23/2008 17:00 - 18:00	Marriott Golden Gate B3
S300236	Oracle Enterprise Manager Hands-on Lab: SOA Management and Java Application Diagnostics	Nadu Bharadwaj, Oracle; Prasad Kona, oracle; Dean Margolese, Oracle; Rajagopal Marripalli, Oracle; Will Scelzo, Oracle; Rajiv Taori, Oracle; brian hengen, oracle	Thursday 09/25/2008 12:00 - 13:00	Marriott Golden Gate B3

Also we will have several booths in the Exhibition Hall where we will demo our products. So please stop by!

Approaches to Java application diagnostics

By Madhav Sathe

Even well tested applications may have problems once they go live. More often application problems lead to loss of business. It is really an uphill task to diagnose application problems in real time. Most Java/J2EE diagnostic tools available in the market fail to meet requirements to troubleshoot problems real time.

Some of the common reasons are:

• Performance overhead is high
• They enforce application downtime,
• Require changes to application binaries
• Complexities in install and deployment

One of common problems in these tracing tools are that they work in Silos and – cannot trace transactions across tiers i.e. from application server to database.

Most commercial applications use a database as the persistence store and the database can often be source of the problem. Unless you address all of these issues you can’t have a product that can be used in production environment.

Usually one of the following techniques are used to debug or profile the JVM and application.

• Byte code instrumentation (BCI)
• Aspect oriented programming (AOP)
• JMX
• JMVTI

These tools have several drawbacks. BCI and AOP can provide you granularity but are very complex to write but need server restart or redeployment of application. JMX can provide profiling but is not useful in diagnosis. It does not give code level details. JVMTI has overhead of around 10% and that too needs JVM restart. Also these tools are silo oriented, they don’t provide cross tier visibility. Installation and deployment of these tools is complex. All these limitations make them ‘developer tools’.

Fortunately Oracle AD4J (application diagnostics for Java) addresses all of the above-mentioned issues making it perfect for diagnosing production issues of Java application. The most prominent features of AD4J are that it has overhead of less than 1% and it is hot deployable. By hot deployable, I mean it does not require any application changes or server restart. AD4J achieves this by installing an agent (which is a WAR) file that directly readsmetrics/data from JVM s using native calls making it really lightweight.

The other feature that separates AD4J from other tools is its ability to follow transactions from application to database and vice a versa. There are several other features that make AD4J only and the most effective solution for monitoring j2ee applications in production environment.

• Real time visibility of code and application state
• Differential memory analysis and finding memory leaks
• Interactive transaction trace
• Request performance breakdown by tier, JSP, EJB, JDBC and SQL
• Trace in-flight transactions
• System monitoring and reporting

These features make it possible for users to find variety of problems in J2EE applications. Most typical scenarios where people use AD4J are

• Page hang
• Slow performance
• Memory leaks
• Find out slowest requests and their root cause

You can download AD4J from here. I will write a series of articles explaining the features in details and how to install it.

Middleware management offerings from Oracle

It’s very strange that many people still think Oracle to be database company even after it has acquired PeopleSoft, Siebel, Retek, BEA and many more :) In a similar vain, it is surprising that many people think Oracle Enterprise manager Grid Control can only manage databases and to find out that many people are still not aware about middleware management offerings from Oracle. Beside the Application Server Control that ships with Oracle Application Server, Oracle offers a rich set of management functionalities with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control for managing application servers, SOA and Identity management components, enterprise java and composite applications. In this blog, I will introduce the middleware management functionalities offered by Oracle.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control allows enterprises to manage their complete IT infrastructure that includes host machines, databases, middleware, network devices and packaged applications.

Oracle offers several packs or add-ons and plug-ins for middleware management with Grid Control that enables administrators to do their jobs better. These include management packs such as Diagnostics, Configuration Management, Provisioning and SOA, Identity Management and Business Intelligence. Most of these packs are available for both Oracle and non-Oracle middleware. The following table gives a quick overview of EM packs.

Pack / Offerings	Description
Diagnostics	Monitor application server and ability to diagnose production issues. Includes Oracle AD4J
Provisioning	Deployment procedure to install software, clone, apply patches
Configuration management	Collect configuration information and track changes. Enable to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and ITIL Practices.
SOA Management	Manage Oracle’s SOA offerings such as BPEL PM, BPEL Processes, etc. Supported on Oracle SOA suite running on OAS, WebLogic and IBM Websphere.
Identity management	Monitor and manage Oracle Identity management suite.
Service Level management	Manage SLA and monitor SLA compliance and violations
BI management	Manage performance and availability of Oracle Business Intelligence – Enterprise Edition
Third-party middle plug-ins	Monitor third-party middleware such as JBoss, Tomcat, IBM Websphere, Microsoft IIS, .Net Framework, BizTalk, IBM Websphere MQ, etc

Additionally Oracle has two more product offerings:

Product	Description
Real User Experience Insight	It is a separate product that provides insight into real end user experiences
Application Quality Management	It is separate product suite that helps improve quality, scalability, and availability of applications

The Application Server Diagnostics pack allow you to diagnose problems in your production Java applications deployed either in Oracle Application Server 10g or Oracle WebLogic Server. Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) is part of this offering. You can use this tool to diagnose problems in Java applications running on non-Oracle middleware such as IBM Websphere, JBoss Application server, Tomcat, etc.

The application server configuration management pack allows you to collect application server configuration information and compare between versions or servers and detect changes between versions. It also allows you to
comply with the regulations and industry standards like Sarbanes-Oxley and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The configuration pack is available for both Oracle and non-Oracle middleware.

The application server provisioning pack allows you automate several mundane tasks such as installation of application server software, applications and patching of application servers.

If you use SOA in your enterprise then Grid Control SOA management pack makes management of your BPEL infrastructure seamless. It allows you to monitor availability and performance BPEL PM, BPEL Processes and partner links. It also provides integration with Oracle BAM.

The Identity management pack allows you manage and monitor Oracle Identity management suite. It allows you monitor and improve performance and availability of IDM components such as Oracle Access Manager (OAM), Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), and Oracle Identity Federation (OIF).

The service level management pack allows you to define system/business services and service level agreements and then allows you to monitor service availability, performance, usage and service level compliance.

Oracle also provides several plug-ins for several non-Oracle middleware such as IBM Websphere, JBoss, Tomcat, Microsoft IIS, BizTalk, etc. You can find more about the plug-ins at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/extensions/index.html.

Oracle Real User Experience Insight enables enterprises to maximize the value of their business critical applications by delivering insight into real end user experiences. The distinct features that UXInsight provides are real user monitoring, application performance monitoring, service level management and usage analytics.

Oracle’s Application Quality Management solutions allow you to deploy higher quality applications with less cost and effort. They ensure the quality, scalability, and availability of packaged, Web and service oriented architecture based applications and their underlying infrastructure by enabling you to thoroughly test them. The Application Quality Management solutions consist of three distinct offerings:

• Oracle Application Testing Suite
• Oracle Real Application Testing
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Data Masking Pack

Essentially you can monitor your complete applications infrastructure using Oracle Enterprise manager. To learn more about these products visit

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/. You can also download trial versions of these product offerings from OTN.

We are working to add functionality to improve management for WebLogic servers and other aspects of middleware that we acquired from BEA.

So stay tuned!