Overview of version 12c

We can now have a quick introductory look at the latest version of Enterprise Manager, which is Cloud Control 12c. The console login appears as follows:

We can guess from this first splash screen that Cloud Control 12c has strong Oracle Application Developer Framework (ADF) looks and features, and we won't be far wrong. The new user interface in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c was indeed developed using the ADF.

To make things interesting right at the outset, the splash screen of the console login also highlights some of the key features of Enterprise Manager – a section titled New in this Release and a Did you know... section. Every time you go to this console login, some new information is displayed. You can also expand any of the points to show more information.

In this new version, you can select your own home page—the page you see when you log in to Cloud Control. Suppose you have just installed Cloud Control and are logging in for the very first time, you will immediately be presented with a collection of home pages, one of which can be chosen as the preferred home page. This is seen in the following screenshot:

As we can see here, there are a number of home pages available for DBAs, middleware administrators, level 1 support staff and even Siebel administrators. There is a Summary page that EM Administrators can select; this is closest to the Enterprise Manager home page we used to see in versions 10g and 11g. This shows at a glance the availability and other details of all the Targets where there is an EM Agent talking to this Enterprise Manager system.

There is a Databases home page for DBAs. There are also Middleware, Fusion Applications, and SOA home pages, a Service Dashboard page, an Incidents page, and even a Cloud Infrastructure page for monitoring and managing the Cloud infrastructure. Any of these pages can be selected as the home page at this stage, when first logging on. In the future, it is possible to select any other page as the home page by going to Setup | My preferences | Select My Home from the Cloud Control menu.

Let's say we have selected the Summary page as the home page. The page that appears is shown in the next screenshot:

As we can see from this page, the Cloud Control Summary page displays the overall availability of all the Targets managed by the Enterprise Manager. You can see which Targets are down, and drill down immediately to find the issue. You can see the critical and warning Incidents that have been raised by the Targets, any Problems, or any Jobs that have failed. You can also drill down to the Patch Recommendations from here—Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c connects to My Oracle Support (MOS) and gets a list of all available patches for the Targets, and displays them here (more on this in a later chapter).

On the second half of the page we can see the inventory at a glance: what type of Hosts, what type of databases, and so on, are present in the enterprise. We can also see the Compliance Summary and the Least Compliant Targets sections, and finally the Service Requests section, which shows the service requests that have been opened. And all this just on the Summary page.