Preface

Rob's Blackberry screams in the middle of the night. He picks it up with hesitation. He gets a text message from an automated system, telling him that there are serious issues in the applications that he supports, and users in Australia are facing problems as well. Rob is an administrator for middleware applications. He opens his laptop and starts looking at the issue. After hours of investigation he finds that the external web service their application depends on is not responding.

This might sound familiar. It's typical in the life of many of today's administrators. Welcome to the world of middleware management, where life starts with service violations and ends with the diagnostics of performance issues.

Most modern applications have become global, and run 24X7 and if you are a middleware administrator then probably your work has become 24X7 too. Today's applications are very complex and depend on several components that you, as an administrator, do not have control over. But you have the responsibility to make sure that the application meets availability and performance criteria. You probably want to avoid situations like Rob's and do away with sleepless nights. You probably want to be proactive and implement the right tools and methodologies so that you can avoid many of the interruptions to your applications.

Throughout this book, we will discuss how you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager to proactively monitor your middleware applications and the underlying infrastructure.

Before we do that, let us first drill down and examine the various complexities in modern applications.