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Overview

The sheer complexity of enterprise application systems presents you, the Oracle Applications system administrator, with much greater challenges than managing the database by itself. The Oracle Management Pack for Oracle Applications (hereafter referred to as the Management Pack for Oracle Applications) helps you better manage your systems through a single console, from which you can monitor and administer all major aspects of the system, including databases and concurrent managers.

The Management Pack for Oracle Applications extends Oracle Enterprise Manager to enable the monitoring, diagnosing, and capacity planning of the multitiered Oracle Applications environment. The Management Pack for Oracle Applications takes advantage of the following Oracle Enterprise Manager system management features:

• Discovery and graphical representation of services to be monitored
• Starting tools from the console in the context of a specific service
• Automated data collection and management services
• Central monitoring and administration of remote systems using intelligent agents

The Management Pack for Oracle Applications extends the following tools to work with Oracle Applications:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Console

  The console is extended to discover concurrent managers and to notify you should any of the servers go down. You can also define event tests and jobs for any of the Oracle Applications subsystems, allowing central administration of a distributed Oracle Applications system.

• Oracle Applications Advanced Event Tests and Jobs

  A library of event tests specific to Oracle Applications are provided for lights-out event monitoring and problem detection of the Oracle Applications system.

  Additional lights-out problem resolution is provided with fix-it jobs that are configured to run automatically when an event triggers. These fix-it jobs are either custom-built or chosen from a small predefined set provided with the Management Pack for Oracle Applications.

• Oracle Performance Manager

  An Oracle Applications cartridge feeds data to Oracle Performance Manager, providing you with an extensive array of real-time monitoring charts on all concurrent managers and Oracle Forms sessions that are used by your Oracle Applications instance. Information about these charts and chart groups is provided in the Performance Manager help.

• Oracle Capacity Planner

  Concurrent manager performance data is gathered over time and fed to Oracle Capacity Planner for analysis of resource consumption and detection of performance anomalies.

• Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant

  This utility allows you to examine historical processing information about Oracle Concurrent Processing requests and concurrent managers.

This chapter investigates the interaction of each of these tools with Oracle Applications.

What's New in Version 9i

The Oracle Management Pack for Oracle Applications release 9i offers the following new features:

• A new repository schema has been introduced in this release. The Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant repository stores FND table information that normally would be purged. This data is aggregated into new tables allowing for additional analysis.
• New 'Load Data into Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant Repository' job used to schedule a daily transfer between the FND tables and the Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant repository
• Descriptions of concurrent manager charts are available in help
• Tuning Advisor reports in the Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant. These reports provide information about possible solutions for problems that may be impeding the best-possible performance of your concurrent manager.
• New Unresponsive Concurrent Manager event checks the responsiveness of the concurrent managers
• Performance Manager and Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant are now web-enabled

Oracle Enterprise Manager Console

Concurrent Manager servers can be discovered in the Oracle Enterprise Manager navigator. By discovering all databases and Concurrent Manager servers available on the system, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single point of administration for an Oracle Applications system. The integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the benefits of the existing 3-tiered management infrastructure and provides you with a familiar interface thus reducing the learning curve.

Central Administration of Oracle Applications System

You can group together discovered services into a single logical entity, such as the Production Financials System or the Human Resource Test System. Once grouped, you can quickly identify which system is affected when a particular Oracle Forms server goes down, or easily link the slow performance of a particular application with an overloaded concurrent manager in that system.

The base Enterprise Manager console ships with simple events for Oracle Applications, allowing you to check whether the relevant subsystems are up or down, and have notifications delivered by a pager or e-mail to the appropriate administrators identified by their job responsibilities and work shifts. This capability allows you not only to detect problems before an end user does, but also to do so when you are not even in the office!

Automatic Problem Resolution

The base console also is shipped with a library of predefined jobs specific to Oracle Applications, such as shutting down or starting up a remote server. These jobs can be configured to trigger automatically as fix-it jobs for particular events, or scheduled to run at predefined times or intervals. As a result, you can automatically correct problems before end users are aware of them.

Oracle Applications Advanced Event Tests

In addition to the basic UpDown event tests provided for all services administered in the Oracle Enterprise Manager console, the Management Pack for Oracle Applications provides a library of advanced event tests specific to Oracle Applications subsystems. Examples of the problems that the event tests notify you of include:

• Internal Concurrent Manager is waiting on a lock.
• Percentage of requests with errors has exceeded a threshold.
• Run-alone request was submitted, locking out all other requests.

See Chapter 6, "Oracle Applications Advanced Event Tests" for a complete list of these problems.

The key to smooth system administration is to resolve problems before they turn into crises. These advanced event tests allow you to focus on the causes of problems before the symptoms become serious. In addition, with pager and e-mail notification mechanisms provided by Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can be notified of any problems with the system wherever you are located.

Oracle Performance Manager

The Management Pack for Oracle Applications uses Oracle Performance Manager, a tool also available as part of the Oracle Diagnostics Pack. Oracle Performance Manager has been extended to monitor the performance statistics of concurrent managers.

Oracle Performance Manager displays performance data in real-time graphical views that can be automatically refreshed at user-defined intervals. Multiple charts and tables can be presented in a single monitoring window, affording you a multifaceted view of applications' system performance. For example, an Oracle Applications administrator can monitor the number of Oracle Forms sessions, pending concurrent requests, and the number of running concurrent requests all in a single screen. The following are two of the predefined chart groups shipped with the Management Pack for Oracle Applications:

• System Activity Overview Chart Group
  • Forms Sessions and Concurrent Requests Chart
  • Completed Requests by Status Chart
  • Pending Requests per Manager Chart
  • Running Requests per Manager Chart
  • Longest Running Requests Chart
• Top Resource Consumers Chart Group
  • Top Form Sessions Chart
  • Top Running Requests Chart

Users can further drill down on these charts to see greater detail, and in some cases, drill down to problematic requests and terminate them. Many other subsystem specific charts are available, giving you a rich set of data to analyze your system from multiple angles. See Performance Manager help for a description of individual charts.

Oracle Capacity Planner

The same data collection mechanism used by Oracle Performance Manager is also used to collect historical performance and resource consumption data for capacity planning. The Management Pack for Oracle Applications uses Oracle Capacity Planner to analyze concurrent manager performance data to help you configure your systems appropriately and project your future capacity needs.

Historical data can be gathered for many charts exposed in the Oracle Performance Manager. This collection can be customized, allowing you to select the interval at which these statistics should be sampled. The data collection mechanism allows you to customize roll up capabilities, where data can be aggregated at the end of each hour, day, week, or month. This data collection mechanism, along with data expiration policies you customize, gives you full control over the amount of storage needed for the historical data.

Once the data is gathered, you can use Oracle Capacity Planner to chart the historical data for the purposes of identifying trends and predicting future hardware requirements for the system. You can also extrapolate to a particular point in time or work back from a particular target value and find when that event is expected to occur. These charts can be customized, allowing you to get the data you need and to view data from multiple sources (for example, CPU, disk, and concurrent manager processes) on a single, unified chart.

Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant

The Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant reports historical information about concurrent managers, concurrent programs, and concurrent processing requests. You can use these reports to achieve better throughput and performance.

With the Tuning Assistant you can connect to the Concurrent Processing Tuning Assistant repository, the Oracle Management Server, or the database schema containing the Oracle Application Object Library tables for the subsystems you want to tune.

The Tuning Advisor feature of the Tuning Assistant provides information about possible solutions for problem areas that are preventing optimum performance of your concurrent manager.

The Tuning Assistant reports help you balance concurrent manager workloads by determining:

• Time periods with greatest wait times
• Requests that waited during those time periods
• Time periods with excess concurrent manager capacity

You can then reschedule requests that waited, add more concurrent managers, or, if necessary, add more hardware to address the problem. In addition, you can follow the suggestions offered in the Tuning Advisor reports.

Many reports allow you to drill down to other reports associated with the selected items. For example, when you run the Waiting Requests by Hour report, you can quickly determine the time period with the greatest wait times. You can then select the period, drill down to the Requests that Waited report, and identify the requests that were blocked.

Oracle Applications Manager

Oracle Applications has integrated its concurrent manager administrative interface with Oracle Enterprise Manager, enabling administrators to better manage their systems.

The Oracle Applications Manager console provides an Applications DBA-oriented subset of the current Oracle Applications System Administration functions. These functions include administration of concurrent managers, processes, and requests.

The Oracle Applications Manager is available for Releases 11.0 and 11i.

This functionality is in addition to the multi-window Oracle Applications forms, and administrators can choose which tools to use. Requests submitted within the standard Oracle Applications windows can be viewed from the Oracle Applications Manager console. Likewise, concurrent managers defined in the console can be accessed from within the Oracle Applications windows.

While Oracle Applications Manager thoroughly complements the monitoring capabilities of the Management Pack for Oracle Applications tools, it is released separately from the Management Pack for Oracle Applications as a free download from Oracle MetaLink.

Access the Oracle MetaLink (www.oracle.com/support/metalink/index.html) site to download Oracle Applications Manager and the associated Oracle Applications Manager Server Extensions.