Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Release 5. The details were shared in an Oracle blog post by Mughees Minhas, product management vice president, enterprise and cloud manageability, Oracle.
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a system management tool that provides an integrated solution for managing heterogeneous environments. It combines a graphical console, agents, common services, and tools to provide an integrated, comprehensive systems management platform for managing Oracle products.
“This release has been in the making for over a year and represents major breakthroughs in monitoring and management automation for Oracle environments,” wrote Minhas. “Oracle Enterprise Manager is our flagship management product for the Oracle stack. Tens of thousands of customers rely on Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) every day for their business and mission-critical applications. Many of our customers and partners have offered support for this release, some of whom provided quotes that I am happy to share below. So many of our customers use EM because of its core capabilities that can’t be found in any other technology for managing Oracle infrastructure across various deployment models.”
Key Enhancements in Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Release 5
With this new release of Enterprise Manager, said Minhas, users can manage targets running anywhere, on-premise, or in the cloud. Without needing to learn or deploy new tools. Existing best practices, scripts and jobs can be applied to cloud resources just like on-premises resources. Specifically, for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources, EM understands the native cloud APIs for management operations and leverages them to provide a seamless experience.
For organizations using or considering using Oracle Cloud databases such as Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service, or Exadata Cloud@Customer, they can comprehensively manage them with EM.
In addition, EM Hybrid Database-as-a-Service now supports self-service provisioning across on-premises and OCI (VM, Baremetal, Exadata Cloud Service and Exadata Cloud@Customer) and provides self-service governance tools for effective cloud resource utilization.
Database Migration Workbench provides a complete platform to help DBAs move databases between on-premises and OCI. This workbench helps you plan the migration, performs pre-requisite checks to make sure that migration can occur successfully, then selects the best data movement technology (e.g., Data Pump, RMAN, etc.) based on the source and target choices, such as database versions and type of database, and then executes the actual migration plan. Post-migration, it uses the SQL Performance Analyzer feature to make sure your workload on the migrated platform will perform well. If any performance regressions are detected, it reports them to you so that you can take proactive actions before opening up the database for end-users.
Another new feature introduced in the new release is OCI bridge, which can be thought of as a connection from EM to Oracle Cloud. According to Minhas, the bridge is used to copy data from the EM repository and the targets it manages to the designated OCI object store, where it is accessed by OCI services such as Logging Analytics and Operations Insights. These cloud services provide deep analytics and identify data patterns which can help prevent outages and achieve better application and database performance regardless of where databases are deployed.
Oracle is also offering additional new capabilities in this release, said Minhas:
- Smart Event Compression automatically groups multiple separate but related events into a single incident. For example, when a host goes down, the resulting availability events on the host and all targets on that host will be automatically compressed into a single incident. Working with a smaller set of actionable incidents enables Operations teams to better triage, respond, and manage incidents.
- Dynamic Runbooks speed up incident resolution by encapsulating subject matter expertise for diagnosing and resolving incidents into actionable Runbook procedures in EM. In this release, these teams can create these runbook procedures directly inside EM. This allows teams to encapsulate in EM their operational expertise in diagnosing and resolving incidents. When an incident is raised, IT Ops teams have easy access to the appropriate runbook, and can quickly execute the specified procedures. These procedures can dynamically invoke metric charts or execute an SQL or an OS command, promoting more consistent and faster incident response times, and reduces overall mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR).
- In the area of performance management, there is also a new feature called Automatic Workload Analysis. With this feature, EM constantly compares the current database performance with the baseline workload, and any divergence from this baseline is highlighted on the database home page.
- Near-Zero Downtime Patching is a new feature in this release. With the monthly Release Update (RU) model from the EM 13.4 version, staying up with the latest RU on EM can be challenging due to the downtime to apply the patch. Meeting SLAs for planned maintenance and losing sight of critical targets was always a question when moving to the latest RU, said Minhas. In this release Oracle is introducing Near-Zero Downtime Patching for applying RUs on EM while it is up and running to ensure that critical monitoring and alerting is mostly available during planned maintenance.
For complete details on the new release, go to www.oracle.com/enterprisemanager and, to read Minhas’ blog post, go to https://blogs.oracle.com/oem/announcing-oracle-enterprise-manager-13c-release-5.