Using Oracle Enterprise Manager for More Than Monitoring

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c allows IT professionals to manage and monitor a wide range of environments, including the private enterprise cloud, from one console. But according to the company, many professionals are not fully using all the available capabilities integrated into the software. Although it’s great for monitoring, it can also be used for various other management tasks.

As Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle executive vice president for database server technologies, explained in an early 2015 piece for ForbesBrandVoice, these advanced functions are made possible through Oracle Multitenant, which runs as many as 252 databases within a single container database. He adds:

DBAs can now do most common administration functions like patching, upgrade, and backup at the container database level. This drastically reduces the cost of managing your databases. Plus efficiencies in the new multitenant architecture allow up to 5x more databases to be run on a given server or VM, which ups the ante considerably on the hardware savings represented by server consolidation.

Oracle Recovery Manager

Perhaps one of the most useful tasks, according to Porus Homi Havewala, senior manager at Enterprise Technology Program Office of Oracle Singapore, is Enterprise Manager’s ability to create and schedule database backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN). That enables database administrators to back up “thousands of databases … more easily and efficiently than the older, more time-consuming, manual method of performing Unix shell scripting and cron jobs for each database to be backed up.”

Using Enterprise Manager for backup allows users to take advantage of newer RMAN features, including compression, encryption, and block change tracking. It also eliminates the need to write specific scripts for setting up and scheduling backups. You need only use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, which offers a step-by-step backup wizard for scheduling many different kinds of backups.

The settings can be changed, for example, based on the compression needed or to conform to a specific data retention policy or even to back up individual tablespaces, data files, or archive logs. To effectively back up a large database, for example, a user can schedule incremental as well as full backups throughout the week. Notification can be sent to a specific database administrator in the event any of these backups fail.

Oracle is for More Than Just Monitoring

There are numerous other strategies for going beyond monitoring in Oracle’s white paper on the topic. These include using My Oracle Support for automatic patching, streamlining the creation of standby databases, UNIX host monitoring, and managing Oracle Exadata, provisioning, and many other tasks. There are also many other capabilities available through a growing number of Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensions, including management packs, connectors, and plug-ins.

As Havewala, who also wrote the white paper, explains:

These are nitty-gritty tasks but they combine to take up a lot of DBA’s [sic] time and effort. Not only by using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c’s automation and its manage many as one approach, DBAs now can devote their efforts to higher value tasks like improving service quality and system availability and become true strategic advisors to the business.

We’ve previously offered other ideas for working with Oracle, including a webinar with Chuck Ezell on the value of conducting Oracle Health Checks. If you have questions about how to optimize your Oracle configuration, Datavail can work with you and your organization to effectively support your Oracle environment for your benefit and that of your clients and customers.

To learn more about our remote database services and how our experts can help with your ongoing Oracle operations, please contact Datavail to discuss a custom solution designed for your enterprise.