A (Oracle) Pirate Looks At: Extending OEM 12c with Oracle Application Management Pack for E-Business Suite

Mother, mother Oracle. I have heard you call… Wanted to sail upon your cloud (control) since 7.3.4… You’ve seen it all, you’ve seen it all… (Paraphrased from Jimmy Buffett’s, “A Pirate Looks at 40”)

For a while now, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) has had an application management component for E-Business Suite (EBS). However, it wasn’t until this latest release that Oracle decided to bundle the previously stand-alone Application Management Pack and the Application Change Management Pack and deliver them as a plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. It’s touted as a complete and integrated application management solution to help achieve high levels of performance, availability, and control while helping reduce the costs of managing Oracle E-Business Suite applications, in both version 11i and R12.

Today, we’ll look at a high-level overview of deploying the EBS Application Management Pack (AMP) and some of the basic features, such as proactive monitoring of the EBS components and concurrent processing management. We’ll also discuss some of the new integrated change management features such as Patch Manager, Setup Manager, and the Customization Manager. And then finally, we’ll talk about some of the functionality delivered with AMP release 12.1.0.1. Each of these items mentioned above could be a blog post in themselves (and probably will be in the future), so for now, we’re just going to arm you with enough information to be dangerous and to get you started.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.1) or 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2)
• Oracle E-Business Suite:
  • 11i: Release 11.5.10 CU2 with ATG_PF.H RUP6 or higher
  • 12.0: Release 12.0.4 with R12.ATG_PF.A.delta.6
  • 12.1: Release 12.1 with R12.ATG_PF.B.delta.3

Since the Oracle Application Management Pack for E-Business Suite is a plug-in, a fully operational Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control environment needs to be up and running already and management agents deployed to your EBS servers. (In fact, the note mentioned above will actually give you directions on installing OEM 12c and deploying the management agents.)

The next step is to deploy the Fusion Middleware plug-in in order to prepare it to receive the AMP plug-in. After that, you can download the E-Business Suite AMP plug-in from the Enterprise Manager Store and add it to your Software Library. Once that’s ready, you can deploy the AMP plug-in much like you did for the Middleware plug-in. Please note that during the installation, the Oracle Management Service will be bounced, so if you are deploying this in a production environment, be aware that there may be short outages in your monitoring.

Oracle has integrated some great new products to make your life a whole lot easier in the arena of Change Management. Change Management for Oracle E-Business Suite used to be a stand-alone product, but is now integrated into the Oracle AMP for EBS. It provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. Along with an overview of each product, I’ll include a link where you can watch a short demonstration from Oracle to further explain some of the functionality and actually see it in action. (Note: The videos are from an older version, but you'll get the point.)

• Patch Manager: Allows you to deploy patches across Oracle E-Business Suite instances from a single console. Patch Manager integrates with My Oracle Support and can automatically download and deploy patches across multiple (single or multi-node) Oracle E-Business Suite instances. In Oracle E-Business Suite both patches and patchsets, as well as patches created with Customization Manager, are supported. Patch Manager Demonstration Video

• Customization Manager: Automates the process of packaging, releasing, deploying, and migrating customizations for a single Oracle E-Business Suite instance or multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. It provides the capability to integrate with third-party source control repositories to access customizations that need to be packaged. Before packaging the updates, Customization Manager validates the customization against software coding best practices. These custom packages can then be patched to Oracle E-Business Suite instances like any other Oracle Patch either using the Oracle Applications DBA (AD) utilities or using Patch Manager. Customization Manager Demonstration Video

• Setup Manager: Helps define implementation projects in terms of functional setups that need to be migrated across Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Setup Manager extends the capabilities of Oracle iSetup by providing functional configuration change management capabilities across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Setup Manager Demonstration Video

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite provides an Administration Dashboard for remotely managing Oracle E-Business Suite targets from an Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console. Jobs can be submitted to start/stop various Oracle E-Business Suite components from the Administration Dashboard. The details and statuses of these jobs can be tracked through standard Enterprise Manager Job screens.

In addition, AMP provides an Application System Performance capability that allows you to monitor the performance of specific targets, such as Concurrent Requests, User Sessions, and Workflow Items. You can also monitor HTTP server requests, JVM usage, and throughput. Also, there are a whole slew of additional APIs to monitor EBS specific items such as concurrent processing and users.

Probably one of the best features is the ability to schedule an E-Business Suite system automatically using the Smart Clone procedure, whether it’s a single-node to single-node or multi-node to single-node environment (as of now, only scaling down is supported). There’s also support for configuring the database, even RAC environments (although the actual database cloning is done via the Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Plug-in – more to come on that subject soon). The Smart Clone procedure can also fill specific needs like data masking, data compression, as well as customized pre- and post-scripts needed to finish your clone.

Finally, AMP can provide seamless integration with all the administrative activities you’re used to within Oracle Application Manager (OAM). It allows you to compare configuration information from earlier in time or from multiple other EBS systems being monitored by OEM. You can also view diagnostic and patch information for each environment.

So, in essence, Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite can help manage and streamline your application processes, saving you time, money, manpower, and resources. You can keep an eye on your entire environment and complete life-cycle processes all from the convenience of a single dashboard. With the integration of the Oracle Application Change Management Pack, keeping track of setups and customizations are a snap, and you can now even deploy these in a manner familiar to us all: adpatch. It does require an additional license (nothing this nice is ever free, eh!), but I hope I’ve given you enough information to get you started down the path of seeing whether this tool can enhance your Oracle E-Business Suite experience.