Grid Control is a system management software that offers centralized monitoring, administration, and lifecycle management functions for the entire Oracle IT infrastructure, including systems running both Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.
Your infrastructure may include multiple Oracle databases, Oracle WebLogic managed servers, web applications deployed on these servers, and hosts running these targets, among others. Of course, you can use individual product consoles to monitor the status of each of these targets, but switching between multiple console windows and tracking the performance of each target across so many windows can become cumbersome.
What does Oracle Grid Control offer?
Grid Control provides a single-pane solution that allows you to monitor and manage the entire Oracle IT infrastructure from one console. Grid Control also offers support for monitoring certain non-Oracle products, such as IBM WebSphere Application Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Juniper Networks NetScreen Firewall.
With a broad set of end-to-end monitoring, administration, configuration management, provisioning, and security capabilities, Grid Control reduces the cost and complexity of managing such grid computing environments. Its robust service-level management functionality greatly enhances service levels through rich transaction and end-user performance monitoring and deep diagnostics for multi-tier Internet applications.
What are the main features of Oracle Grid Control?
Enterprise Manager allows users to manage their applications from top to bottom, from monitoring service levels to proactively isolating business exceptions before they escalate to address issues at any level of the IT stack.
Users can manage the entire application lifecycle with comprehensive compliance and application quality management solutions. Key features include:
- Group Management
Today's IT operations staff are often responsible for managing a large number of components, such as databases, application servers, hosts, or other components. The Enterprise Manager group management system allows you to combine components (called targets in Enterprise Manager) into logical sets, called groups.
By organizing targets into groups, you can manage and monitor many components as a single unit. The group management system enables you to effectively organize, manage, and monitor the potentially large number of targets in your enterprise.
The group management system allows you to:
- View a summarized status of the targets within the group.
- Monitor pending alerts and policy violations for the group collectively, rather than individually.
- Track overall group performance through performance charts.
- Perform administrative tasks, such as scheduling jobs for the entire group or shutting down the group during maintenance periods.
- System Monitoring
Enterprise Manager provides comprehensive, flexible, and user-friendly monitoring functionality that supports the timely detection and notification of impending IT issues across your enterprise. For applications built on Oracle, Enterprise Manager offers the most complete monitoring of the Oracle Grid environment, covering everything from Oracle database instances to actual Oracle application clusters and Oracle application server farms and clusters.
For example, Enterprise Manager's monitoring functionality is closely integrated with Oracle Database 10g management features, such as server-generated alerts. These alerts are generated by the database itself based on issues it has detected. Server-generated alerts can be managed from the Enterprise Manager console and include recommendations on how these issues can be resolved.
Performance issues, such as poorly performing SQL and corresponding recommendations generated by the database’s self-diagnosis engine, known as the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM), are also captured and displayed through the Enterprise Manager console. This allows Enterprise Manager administrators to implement ADDM recommendations with ease and convenience.
Enterprise Manager comes with a comprehensive set of performance and status metrics that allow you to monitor key components in your environment, such as applications, application servers, databases, and the backend components they rely on, such as hosts, operating systems, and storage.
The Management Agent on each monitored host tracks the status, health, and performance of all managed components (also known as targets) on that host. If a target fails or a performance metric crosses a critical or warning threshold, an alert is generated and sent to Enterprise Manager and to the Enterprise Manager administrators who have registered an interest in receiving such notifications.
Some metrics have predefined threshold parameters, known as thresholds, that trigger alerts when metric values exceed these thresholds. An alert indicates a potential problem, suggesting that a warning or critical threshold has been crossed for a monitored metric. Alerts can also be generated for various availability states, such as:
- The target is down.
- The Oracle Management Agent monitoring the target is unreachable.
When an alert is generated, you can access details about the alert from the Enterprise Manager console. Administrators can receive automatic notification when an alert is generated, and corrective actions can be automatically configured to resolve an alert condition.
- Job System
The Enterprise Manager Job System provides the capability to automate routine administrative tasks and synchronize components in your environment for more efficient management. A job is a unit of work defined to automate commonly executed tasks. One of the advantages of jobs is that you can schedule a job to start immediately or at a later date and time. You also have the option to run the job once or at a specific interval.
The Enterprise Manager Job System serves a dual purpose:
- It provides automation for many administrative tasks, such as backup, cloning, and patching.
- It allows users to create their own jobs using custom operating system scripts and SQL scripts.
Enterprise Manager provides predefined job tasks for targets and database deployments. A job task is used to contain predefined and unalterable logic, for example, patching an application, backing up a database, etc.
In addition to predefined job tasks, you can define your own job tasks by writing code to include in OS and SQL scripts. Besides submitting jobs to individual targets, you can submit jobs to a group of targets. Any job submitted to a group automatically extends to all its member targets and considers group membership as it changes.
- Information Publisher
Information Publisher, Enterprise Manager’s powerful reporting framework, makes information about your managed environment available to audiences across the enterprise. Reports are used to present a view of corporate monitoring information for business intelligence purposes but can also serve an administrative function by displaying activity, resource utilization, and configuration of managed targets.
IT administrators can use reports to display the availability of managed system sets. Executives can view reports on application availability (such as corporate email) over a period of time.
The reporting framework allows you to create and publish custom reports. Intuitive, HTML-based reports can be published on the web, stored, or emailed to selected recipients. Information Publisher comes with a comprehensive library of predefined reports, allowing you to generate ready-to-use reports without additional setup or configuration. Key benefits of using Information Publisher include:
- Provides a framework for creating well-formatted, content-rich HTML reports based on Management Repository data.
- Ready-to-use reports allow you to start generating reports immediately without any system setup or configuration.
- Ability to schedule automatic report generation and store scheduled copies and/or email them to intended audiences.
- Ability for Enterprise Manager administrators to share reports with the entire business community: executives, customers, and other Enterprise Manager administrators.
EN 
ES