Oracle Corp has announced the next release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, designed to allow IT managers to proactively ensure all components of their infrastructure operate to their best capacity.
These include databases, Web and application servers, business applications, Web services, operating systems, hardware platforms, storage devices and the network.
Now including an HTML management console, Oracle Enterprise Manager 4.0 is said to be the industry`s only management tool that provides end-to-end application performance monitoring and management from a user-centric perspective.
"This allows IT managers and system integrators to know precisely the performance that their Web users are experiencing, diagnose the cause of performance bottlenecks, and implement recommended solutions," says Deon Roos, product manager at Oracle SA.
"With its ability to monitor the health of an infrastructure, Oracle Enterprise Manager can also provide proactive reports to IT managers, enabling them to address potential network infrastructure glitches before they occur."
Currently, says Roos, IT managers must juggle application and database performance monitoring, system and software upgrades, problem diagnosis and resource capacity planning across all components of the enterprise - in an effort to deliver the highest quality of service.
"Oracle Enterprise Manager solves the complexity of managing today`s multi-tier, heterogeneous IT environments with an advanced repository-based architecture.
"With a complete view of an IT infrastructure, organisations can more efficiently manage, monitor and configure the entire enterprise, set controls to automatically implement system patches to maintain a predetermined level of support, increase quality of service and system intelligence, and reduce overall management costs," he adds.
Technical overview
From a technical perspective, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single console to manage and monitor all aspects of the expanded Oracle infrastructure that includes the Oracle database, Oracle9i Application Server and its components.
These include its J2EE server, Web services infrastructure, portal, Web cache, integration, together with operating systems, hardware platforms, and the network.
In contrast to generic management frameworks that require extensive customisation, the newest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 4.0 is said to offer powerful out-of-box capabilities to simplify the task of managing Oracle infrastructure products.
Key new features of Oracle Enterprise Manager 4.0 include:
Application Performance Management: Unique new features enable the measurement of application performance for all users of applications, helping to isolate availability outages and performance bottlenecks throughout the entire application infrastructure.
The new Web-page-to-database (URL-to-SQL) instrumentation enables the monitoring of user request, transactions, and server-side application components and Web services to quickly isolate availability and performance problems. As a result, organisations will be able to minimise application downtime and improve quality of service.
Information Driven Management: With its advanced repository-based Knowledge Centre, Enterprise Manager 4.0 is designed to collect comprehensive metrics on availability, performance and system configuration data.
The Knowledge Centre will provide administrators with real-time and historical data analysis, enabling them to make informed decisions on capacity planning, system upgrades, and tuning for optimal operational efficiency.
Enhanced roll-up reporting makes detailed application and system performance information available to IT decision-makers to, for example, establish and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).
Comprehensive Diagnostics: New diagnostics capabilities enable administrators to quickly identify bottlenecks across multiple layers of technology.
Oracle Enterprise Manager automatically detects problems and delivers proactive system "health advisories" that include recommendations for rapid problem resolution. Administrators will also be able to define custom alerts leveraging the data for historical baselines, trends, and thresholds.
Enterprise Configuration Management: Oracle Enterprise Manager 4.0 automatically inventories deployed systems and collects information such as operating system patch levels and network card parameters.
Using this information, administrators can perform software configuration management operations that include historical change tracking - which allows them to accurately view snapshots of hardware and software, automate patch staging and deliver and perform configuration analyses.
Managing on the Go: The new Enterprise Manager-to-Go (EM2Go) feature extends Oracle Enterprise Manager to mobile communications devices, such as PDAs and cellphones. Administrators will now be able to remotely access status information in the Knowledge Centre, receive notifications, and perform corrective actions or administrative tasks.
Open and Extensible: Oracle Enterprise Manager is built on the open standards architecture in Oracle9i Application Server and will operate with other management tools including HP Open View and any third-party applications deployed on the Oracle infrastructure.
Independent software vendors (ISVs) can extend Oracle Enterprise Manager to collect, monitor and analyse any third-party application metric using the Enterprise Manager XML toolkit.
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