What this book covers

This book will help you to manage your middleware infrastructure and applications effectively and efficiently using Oracle Enterprise Manager. You will learn how you can proactively monitor your production middleware applications running on Oracle Application Server, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA suite such as Oracle BPEL Process manager, Oracle Server Bus, Oracle Coherence, and so on. You will learn different aspects of proactive monitoring and alert notifications, service level management and incident management, diagnostics of production applications, lifecycle automation using out-of-the-box deployment procedures, patching mechanisms, and so on. You will learn the best practices that you can use to make your middleware infrastructure highly available.

Chapter 1:Enterprise Manager Grid Control will introduce the key concepts of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid control. You will learn about the Grid Control architecture and terminology, basic concepts, and entities. The lifecycle of a managed target in Grid Control.

Chapter 2:Installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control discusses installing Grid Control and its key components. You will also learn about various Grid Control versions, platform support, and installation options, tricks for mass deployment of Grid Control, high availability setup for Grid Control, and some guidelines on what install/setup mode the user should use.

Chapter 3:Enterprise Manager Key Concepts and Subsystems expands further on key entities, subsystems that we introduced in Chapter 1. Besides expanding on those we'll use these subsystems to answer work areas that we outlined in Chapter 1.

We'll also provide the reader with some best practices for using each subsystem.

Chapter 4:Managing Oracle WebLogic Server defines the typical management needs for WebLogic environments and will apply solution areas learned from Chapter 3.

We will have some example exercises on how to set up monitoring and management for WebLogic Server's environment.

We'll also list some of the best practices on how to manage a WebLogic Server.

Chapter 5:Managing Oracle Application Server defines the typical management needs for an Oracle Application Server environment and will apply solution areas learned from Chapter 3.

We will have some exercises on how to set up monitoring and management for an Oracle Application Server environment. We will discuss some of the key features such as deployment and patch automation.

We will also list some of the best practices on how to manage monitoring and management for the Oracle Application Server environment.

Chapter 6:Managing Forms and Reports Services and Applications provides an introduction to Forms and Reports Monitoring. You will learn about both Forms Server and Forms Application Monitoring. You will also learn about Forms Server Cloning using Enterprise Manager Deployment Procedures.

Chapter 7:SOA Management—BPEL Management firstly discusses the business/IT alignment introduction. Then the chapter explains what additional management requirements it puts on middleware administrators.

Also, in this chapter we'll define the typical management needs for SOA/BPEL environments and will apply solution techniques learned from Chapter 3. We'll also explain how to handle additional management requirements coming from the business/IT alignments.

We'll have some exercises on how to set up monitoring and management for SOA/BPEL.

Chapter 8:SOA Management—OSB (aka ALSB) Management will provide an introduction to Oracle Service Bus and managing Oracle Service Bus. We will learn automated deployment of OSB applications and managing configurations for OSB environment. We will also list some of the best practices for managing SOA/OSB environments.

Chapter 9: Managing Identity Manager Suite discusses Oracle Fusion Middleware Identity Manager Suite that enables the users to manage identity and access for enterprise applications. In this chapter, we'll discuss how to manage Oracle's Identity Manager Suite with Enterprise Manager.

Chapter 10:Managing Coherence Cluster discusses Oracle Coherence that is an in-memory caching solution that enables organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications. In this chapter, we'll discuss the monitoring, configuration management, and provisioning aspects of Coherence Cluster.

Chapter 11:Managing Non-Oracle Middleware discusses managing third-party middleware. We will learn about discovering and monitoring of IBM WebSphere, JBoss, Apache HTTP Server, ApacheTomcat, and Microsoft middleware such as Microsoft IIS. We will also learn how to do service level management of applications running on third-party middleware.

Chapter 12:Java and Composite Applications Monitoring and Diagnostics discusses how to diagnose Java applications using Oracle's Enterprise Manager product family such as Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) and Composite Application Monitor and Modeler (CAMM). CAMM allows you to diagnose performance issues in composite applications whereas AD4J allows you to diagnose issues such as memory leak and application in Java applications and the underlying JVM.

Chapter 13:Building your Monitoring Plug-in contains detailed steps on how to extend Grid Control functionality. It'll have a step-by-step instructions for building a monitoring plug-in for Sun System Web Server.

Chapter 14:Best Practices for Managing Middleware Components Using Enterprise Manager discusses some of the best practices for middleware management that you can apply while using Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage your middleware applications.