Oracle Cloud Services for IT Monitoring

    Oracle Cloud Services for IT Monitoring The

    new Oracle cloud services for IT monitoring provide effective real-time monitoring of business application performance and answer a number of questions: how fast web pages open, what errors occur, what is their cause. The monitoring platform also allows you to effectively find the causes of various problems through the analysis of log files and provide resource planning for the IT landscape: measure the load of databases and application servers, evaluate and predict the actual use of CPU, I / O, and memory resources.



    In January 2016, Oracle introduced a group of new services under the general name Management Cloud, including Application Performance Monitoring, Log Analytics, and IT Analytics. They are primarily intended for the IT infrastructure maintenance service, application administrators, IT architects, and IT managers. Of course, users have a question: what about our Enterprise Manager - a single platform for monitoring and managing IT infrastructure? The fact is that Enterprise Manager, of course, is a very powerful system, an indispensable assistant in monitoring individual components, such as a database, server, firmware, etc. But when it comes to localizing a problem, find it in a business application that consists of many components, of many databases, of the many application servers that are installed on different physical and virtual servers, specialized tools are needed. By the way, it is important to understand that the Oracle Management Cloud tools work in the Oracle Public Cloud, but in close integration with the on-premises Enterprise Manager.

    Key features of Oracle Management Cloud tools: monitoring web applications at the end-user and infrastructure components level, assistance in planning capacity and resources for an IT organization, analysis of metrics and events, aggregation of log data, automated detection of anomalies and root causes of incidents. The initial data for monitoring tools are log files, user-generated data, machine data, trace files, performance metrics, diagnostic data from the EM repository, trace data, audit logs, etc. (Figure 1).


    An important data source for the Oracle Management Cloud is Enterprise Manager repository data (Figure 2).


    Application Performance Monitoring (APM)


    The Application Performance Monitoring service (Figure 3) is designed to monitor web applications built on the Oracle WebLogic or Apache Tomcat platform. The tasks of APM are “profiling” web applications at various levels: from the end user to the infrastructure, assistance in finding the root causes of incidents, providing a single interface for the operations department and developers, and, of course, proactive monitoring of end-user experience; The Application Performance Monitoring service allows you to determine the end-user experience with your web application. At the same time, APM allows you to perform contextual top-down analysis of application performance from the user level, visualize the interaction of application modules and, if necessary, switch to the "lower" level,


    The operating service and developers have in the person of Application Performance Monitoring a single source of information for real performance diagnostics down to the level of code and SQL queries. Developers get access to valuable diagnostic data and work together with the service department - they complement each other, this provides quick troubleshooting, and the quality of maintenance (DevOps) is improved.

    The Application Performance Monitoring service is based on a code instrumentation method (a similar technology is used, for example, in Oracle DBMS). Special agents instrument the code of the application and web pages, measuring performance and transmitting metrics to the public cloud through a proxy server in safe mode.

    Log analytics


    The Log Analytics tool (Figure 4) can work in conjunction with Application Performance Monitoring. It is this service that directly works with log files - it is engaged in the search, collection, storage of data from magazines, analysis and research of information in magazines and visualization.


    The advantage of the Log Analytics tool is that it does not depend on either infrastructure components or log file formats. Out of the box service supports about 30 log file formats — database logs, Enterprise Manager, FMW, web servers, cluster software, Linux operating systems, schedulers, etc. To support a non-standard log file, you need to write a simple parser, regex based

    Using machine-generated analysis algorithms, the Log Analytics service can, from thousands of ordinary messages that have accumulated in your log files, for example, over the past 24 hours, identify some valuable error messages — the very errors that may be the root cause of the incident. After a problem is detected, the “Show 1 Minute context” menu appears - that is, displaying the system context one minute before the error message and one minute after it.

    The entire infrastructure of the Log Analytics service is located in the Public Cloud. The user is provided with a convenient Web interface, standard information panels that visualize key events recorded in the log files through various types of diagrams, and you can also create widgets - your own information panels.

    Log Analytics collects data from log files in real time, indexes and stores it in the Public Cloud on a high-performance Big Data platform, which allows you to efficiently work with huge volumes of log data, sort, search, group, and machine analysis.

    Finally, Log Analytics integrates seamlessly with Application Performance Monitoring. The “Drilldown to Log” button allows you to “fail” from the code level to the level of a specific, related infrastructure element.

    IT Analytics


    Businesses need tools to understand the functioning of the current IT landscape, capacity planning, identify problem areas, etc. Existing systems do not solve these problems, because they focus on individual components of the IT landscape, such as a database or middleware, and they do not allow us to establish how the systems function on a data center scale - for a certain period of time, in the context of applications, cost center systems, etc.

    Therefore, another important part of the Oracle Management Cloud services suite is the IT Analytics service (Figure 5). Its scope is analysis of the current IT landscape. The tasks that he performs are: analysis of resource use, recognition of systematic performance problems and resource planning. The goals of the analysis of IT resources are to identify problem areas, compare workloads for various periods, identify the maximum resource consumption by various dimensions, optimize resources and plan growth through load prediction.


    The service also allows you to perform performance analysis according to various criteria, such as process resources, I / O, memory, data storage volumes, middleware performance, Garbage Collector performance. The data visualization capabilities make it possible to simplify the search by various criteria, visualize KPI by key components to analyze current usage and trends, and use information panels. For example: Show a graph of the total CPU usage by business critical database version 12.1.0.2 for the last 3 months.

    The result of using the above-mentioned business opportunities is a proactive approach to monitoring and planning (improving the use of resources by identifying insufficiently or excessively loaded nodes), reducing operating costs (the cost of analyzing and identifying problems) and helping to transform IT (moving to a proactive approach and strategic planning )

    * * *
    We emphasize once again that just as Oracle Enterprise Manager is not a replacement for Oracle Management Cloud, Oracle Management Cloud is in no way a replacement for Enterprise Manager. Oracle Management Cloud Services and your locally installed Enterprise Manager work together. The consolidation and visualization of data from the Enterprise Manager repository and various metrics collected by Oracle Management Cloud agents provides very interesting opportunities - a proactive approach to solving problems, timely, business-oriented monitoring, and improving the interaction of developers and operation services (DevOps).

    Oracle Management Cloud - a set of services in the Public Cloud, offered by subscription, which means that the customer does not need to additionally invest and maintain an expensive, complex infrastructure for monitoring tools. All that is required: install agents and configure data transfer to the Cloud. It must be emphasized that Oracle Management Cloud services do not collect or transfer business data or personal data from the database to the Cloud! Only diagnostic information, metrics, and log data are collected and analyzed, which, if necessary, can be "masked" before being sent to the Cloud.

    Oracle Management Cloud is actively developing, in addition to the Services Performance Monitoring Monitoring, Log Analytics and IT Analytics services described in this article, new services will appear. And most importantly, various IT service teams, such as developers and an operating service, will be able to find a common language and work efficiently!

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