Striking new features in 12c

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is a huge release with a plethora of new features. A few of the outstanding features are described shortly. If some of the terminology is new at this stage, no need to worry; we will go to the appropriate detail later on in most cases.

The infrastructure of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is now more scalable, performant, and reliable, to enable it to support millions of different Targets—much more than the tens of thousands of Targets you could scale up to in previous versions. The Enterprise Manager Framework has been enhanced to a pluggable framework that allows you to download and deploy any plugin via the new self-update feature. The plugins, which were primarily meant for non-Oracle databases, hardware, and software in the past, are now redefined so that even the Oracle Database or Middleware is managed via a plugin. This is quite a change to the basic architecture of Enterprise Manager, which is now more modular and extensible.

As we will see during the actual install process, there are some essential plugins, such as Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware, and some optional plugins, such as Oracle Virtualization, Oracle Cloud Application, Oracle Chargeback and Trending, Oracle Siebel, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and IBM DB2. This demonstrates that there are Target plugins (for management of Oracle or non-Oracle Targets) and there are solution plugins (that give additional functionality, such as Cloud and virtualization).

Some plugins are dependent on one another; for example, the Oracle Cloud Application plugin is dependent on the Oracle Virtualization plugin, as can be seen in the following screenshot (this is from the installation process, which we will look into in detail in this chapter). The screenshot also demonstrates that the Oracle Database itself is listed in the available plugins:

The advantage of this new pluggable framework is that Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c can be updated fast to manage a new technology, for example, if a new database version or a new WebLogic version is released tomorrow, your current installation of Cloud Control 12c should be able to manage it by simply updating the latest database or middleware plugin using the self-update feature.

In the past, you would have had to upgrade your entire Enterprise Manager Release in order to be able to manage a newer database or WebLogic version. As an example, Oracle 11.2 databases could be provisioned only with Enterprise Manager 11g, whereas 11.1 Databases were provisioned with Enterprise Manager 10g. If you had the latter installed and your company upgraded the database to 11.2, you would have to upgrade the entire Enterprise Manager system to fully manage the new release.

However, this is no longer the case. All you need to do now is to use the self-update feature for the plugin. As the plugin can now be revised separately from the core framework, it is possible for Oracle to release a new version of the plugin as soon as it is ready, even though the next Enterprise Manager Platform Release is some way off. So, you can get support for new features faster.

Note that the plugins are cumulative, that is, a plugin supporting the latest version of the Oracle Database will also support all the previous versions of the database Targets.

You can manage the Target plugin lifecycle and seamlessly deploy plugins across both the OMS as well as the Agent tiers, using a single console where you can search for, download, and manage all the Target plugins.

This self-update feature that we talked about for plugins, is also applicable to a number of other entities in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, which are called self-updateable entities. There are a number of such entities for which you can be notified when new versions are available, and you as an Administrator can then view, decide to download as needed, and deploy those new versions if you like. Both online and offline modes are supported.

Examples of self-updateable entities are Enterprise Manager deployment prerequisite checks, management connectors, compliance content (configuration rules and compliance standards), diagnostic checks, Exadata configuration templates, Agent software, (Agent core images), and of course the Target and solution plugins.

Such self-updateable entities also include provisioning bundles; so, for example, you can easily download the latest released and updated deployment procedures. Database provisioning profiles and gold images, middleware profiles and gold images, and virtualization templates and assemblies are also in the list of self-updateable entities.

Hopefully more entities will be made self-updateable in the near future. This truly enables the new version of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c to be able to deliver new features and updates a lot faster, adding those updates outside of the main Enterprise Manager platform releases.

It is now easier to manage and diagnose issues with the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c product itself. The Enterprise Manager console allows you to perform control operations such as starting, stopping, or restarting the OMS, as well as secure and resecure operations. You can update the OMS configuration properties, as well as the Agent properties—the latter can be done either individually or jointly for a group of Agents.

Using the Support Workbench for Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, you can quickly diagnose any problems with the Enterprise Manager console, loader, and notification system. A service request (SR) can be opened easily with MOS and the diagnostic data pertaining to the enterprise manager issue can be collected automatically, packaged by the Workbench, and uploaded to the support site.

Security has also been enhanced. Integration with Oracle Access Manager Single Sign-On (OAM SSO) is now supported out of the box. There is also direct LDAP authentication support for Microsoft Active Directory (AD), as also for Oracle Internet Directory (OID). Kerberos authentication is also supported. The authentication module has been made pluggable, so if you like you can use your own customized authentication module or provider.

Strong authentication for host and database Targets is now supported, with SSH key pairs for host authentication. It is also possible to use Kerberos tickets for database authentication. These tickets can be used for both Cloud Control authentication as well as database authentication; in this case it is possible to seamlessly move between Cloud Control and database Targets without any prompting for database authentication because the same credential is used.

The new Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c release has a much more granular security model, with more than 100 fine-grained privileges. These can be used to control the access to enterprise manager resources such as Targets, templates, jobs, reports, and metric extensions, as well as enterprise manager functionalities such as buttons, pages, links, regions, and URLs. This release also supports Target-type, specific, fine-grained privileges.

You can group together any of these fine-grained privileges into roles, so that it becomes easier to manage your privileges across the enterprise. There are a few predefined out of the box roles that are meant to cater to certain types of enterprise manager users. Some examples are the Cloud Designer, Provisioning Designer, Patch Operator roles, and so on.

The roles in Cloud Control 12c are also integrated with enterprise roles. Suppose you have implemented an authorization management tool such as Oracle Authorization Policy Manager (APM), and if you create a role in this tool for the Test DBA (as an example), then any users of that role will automatically inherit the relevant Cloud Control 12c roles and privileges.

Instead of a tab-driven interface, as in Enterprise Manager Grid Control 11g or 10g, there are drop-down menus in the new version, which help you to navigate easily through all the menu options. Another striking feature is excellent personalization in the 12c release. Your home pages can be customized in terms of layout and displayed data; extra regions from a catalog of predefined regions can be added or removed, and these changes are seen even when you log back in again. Target home pages can also be customized in this way. This is done using the ADF WebCenter technology.

This changes Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c from a more or less fixed page structure in the previous versions to a reasonably customizable interface, and that will help to increase its usage. A Web 2.0 user interface has been used throughout. Any page can now be your home page, and there are also predefined home pages, based on roles, you can select them as the home page.

There is also a new Favorites sub-menu where most pages can be added as Favorites. For example, in the following screenshot, the Databases page has been added as a favorite, and also the Summary page. This was an enhancement request many customers had made, to allow one to go directly to a certain page that was used most often.

The History tab available alongside can be used to go to the recently visited Targets such as databases, listeners, and hosts. It is not a history of pages visited, as one would expect, but the Targets that have been visited. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is a powerful tool that executes a number of database and OS scripts, and performs a number of actions such as patching, cloning, and RMAN backups. To do all these things, a number of credentials are required for hosts, databases, and other Targets. To ease the difficulty in managing all these multiple credentials, the 12c version now boasts a central repository of credentials where all these credentials can be named and stored. These named credentials are another striking feature of the new version.

For these named credentials, passwordless and strong authentication credentials are also supported, for example, Kerberos tickets and SSH key pairs. It is possible to share the named credentials among many different users. Privileges for the access to these credentials can be granted by the owner of the credentials to different users, and the users can then re-use the credentials to gain access to the particular Target—and such users would not know the actual contents of the credentials. This access to the named credentials is controlled and protected by the privileges that are granted.

Global-named credentials can be associated with any Target, whereas Target-named credentials are associated only with a certain Target. You can create or modify named credentials by going to Setup | Security | Named Credentials:

A credential can be simply referred to, instead of copying it. This has the advantage that the credential is stored in one location; the credential reference simply points to it so that when the actual credential is changed, this change will be automatically reflected in all the credential references. There is no longer any need to search through the whole enterprise manager system to find a particular credential stored along with a script or job, and change it, if it has changed. This simplifies credential management substantially. It is also possible to easily switch from one named credential to another.

In this version, all operations on credentials are audited and this can be easily reported on, so there is full accountability as well as traceability of any credential change. You can get a report of everyone who is using a named credential.

As far as enterprise manager reports go, there was always a limit as to what you could achieve. From now on, you can use Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher to design and schedule the delivery of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c reports. Allowing the use of BI Publisher with Enterprise Manager is another great new feature. A Restricted Use License is included, allowing you to use this feature only to access the enterprise manager repository for the purpose of reports.

Reports can be created on the management repository views. These are fully documented in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer's Reference 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) document at the following URL:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/doc.121/e25161/views.htm#sthref1237

To control access to the Targets and what an EM administrator can do, there are now more than 200 new privileges and out-of-the-box roles such as the Provisioning Designer, Provisioning Operator, Patch Designer, and Self Service Administrator. The available Roles can be seen in the following screenshot; this is when we are creating a new administrator by going to Setup | Security | Administrators.

The A dministration Groups is another new feature in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. This is similar to a Target group that you could create in the earlier versions; however the administration group is a special type of group that has advanced functionalities as compared to a Target group.

In the case of the previously available Target groups, although you could create large groups and be able to monitor as well as manage the entire group, the disadvantage was that any new Target always had to be manually added to the Target group. At times, after creating new Targets in Enterprise Manager, manually adding them to the appropriate group was simply forgotten. This meant that the new Target would not be monitored and managed in an appropriate manner.

To resolve such issues, the new administration groups are defined based on certain Target properties, such as lifecycle status, location, line of business, and contact, in a predefined logical hierarchy of your organization. When a new Target is created, its properties can also be set, for example, it can be placed in the Finance line of business, and with the lifecycle status as Test. If there is an existing administration group hierarchy that has been set up with those properties, such as a Finance-Test administration group, the new Target will automatically be placed in the correct administration group without any DBA intervention.

Note that Targets cannot be assigned directly to such groups, they can only be automatically added based on the Target properties that are defined for the Target.

A related new feature called Template collection contains the management settings such as metric settings, compliance standards, and cloud policies. The Template collection can then be associated with a group. So, all the Targets that are automatically added to the group will have the same monitoring settings, compliance standards, and cloud policies propagated to them. Changes in the settings are also deployed automatically to all the members of the administration group.

Privileges are also propagated automatically to the new Target; so if an administrator had only read privileges on the other Targets in the administration group, he or she would have the same read privileges on the new Target. This simplifies management of privileges as well. Incident rules are also integrated with Administration Groups, in the sense that new incident creation, notification actions, and incident management can be defined for the group. These rules are also propagated to any new members.

There only needs to be an initial one-time setup of the administration group hierarchy and associated Template collections. This kind of multipronged automation would definitely be useful in the case of large data centers where new Targets are created and added continuously to the total IT Infrastructure. It would ease the administrative burden on DBAs who are responsible for ensuring that all new Targets are monitored in the same manner, using the corporate-approved monitoring settings and compliance rules. The only thing that needs to be done when adding a Target is to make sure that the Target properties are properly defined at the business or operational level. The screenshot that follows shows the creation of Administration Groups. This is done by going to Targets | Groups | Create.

Systems in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c are used to capture the dependency between Targets. Multiple dependent Targets can make up a system. In the new version, there are predefined out of the box systems for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, WebLogic Server, SOA, and also database Targets. As we will see in the following section, in which we will install Enterprise Manager, when a database Target will be discovered, there will also be a database system in the Target list.

You can create user-defined systems of your own, and in these systems there are more sophisticated association types that can be used; whereas previously there were only two association types available, namely depends on and hosted on. Now you can also use association types such as authenticated by, which helps you to specify the authentication system used by a Target. Other examples of the new types are monitored by, hosted by, contains, uses, and so on.

Availability for user-defined systems is now displayed. The home page and dashboard of any system can be customized with regards to customizable regions, and it is also possible to compare the configuration of a system with a gold image of a configuration stored in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.

You can now create a single instance or RAC database from Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, using a supplied deployment procedure; you can also upgrade multiple databases in parallel for the first time from the central console of Enterprise Manager, using another such procedure. Previously, you could only upgrade a single database at a time using the traditional methods that were not supported by Enterprise Manager, such as the Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA).

This upgrade capability supports database versions 10.2.0.4 and higher that are being upgraded to 11.2.0.x. Various advanced features are used to minimize the downtime of the database upgrade, such as out-of-place copies, a combination of software and database upgrade, preupgrade backup, preupgrade analysis, existing Oracle Home upgrade, and the ability to start or stop the execution of the upgrades. Any patches required before the database upgrade are also checked automatically by connecting to My Oracle Support.

There are also several database cloning enhancements, including the ability to include the Configuration Properties while cloning the database software.

Regarding the provisioning and patching capabilities of the Database Lifecycle Management Pack, one of the striking changes in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is that the Provisioning Designer and Provisioning Operator roles are now separated. The Provisioning Designer controls the logic of the provisioning flow and decides what is to be provisioned and how it will be provisioned. Provisioning profiles are now available, where you take any database environment and store it as a read-only snapshot. This can then be used for the purpose of provisioning. This will be explained in detail in a later chapter.

A number of deployment procedures are provided by Enterprise Manager out of the box, for example, database provisioning. The Provisioning Designer creates a provisioning profile from a reference database system, and then runs and saves a deployment procedure using the profile. The procedure can be locked down by him/her so as to limit and control the number of inputs by the Provisioning Operator.

For example, the Provisioning Designer may want every new database that is created by this procedure to use only Oracle Managed Files (OMF). This selection by the Provisioning Designer can be locked down so that it is unalterable by the Provisioning Operator, who will ultimately use this deployment procedure. The procedure is published to the Provisioning Operator. When the Provisioning Operator deploys this procedure, it will not be possible to change the database file's type from the OMF selection. The Provisioning Operators do not have to understand complex choices or make their own decisions, and this lessens the risk of human errors and also enforces a standard installation across the enterprise via the use of the officially authorized, locked-down procedures.

It is also possible to write a brand new deployment procedure from scratch, and this is known as a User Defined Deployment Procedure (UDDP). In previous versions, it was possible to copy an Oracle-supplied deployment procedure and then edit it by deleting or adding steps. But now, instead of doing that, you can define new and complex in-house deployment procedures of your own. This is helpful for custom software deployments.

This is done by going to Enterprise | Provisioning and Patching | Procedure Library, selecting Create New from the drop-down menu, and clicking on the Go button. This lets you create a new generic deployment procedure with any steps you yourself define, as in the following screenshot. You can integrate this functionality with other tools using either EM CLI or web service interfaces.

A powerful new feature in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is Real-Time Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM). Complementary to the normal ADDM, the Real-Time ADDM is a boon in emergency situations. It allows you to access a hung or seemingly-hung and extremely slow database by accessing the SGA memory in the database server directly, bypassing the SQL layer (using the database preliminary connection capability). A fast non-locking analysis is performed by this tool to diagnose the database, and this aids troubleshooting considerably in such situations.

Real-Time ADDM will automatically detect problems like OS-level paging, database contention, a database hang, and storage subsystem I/O issues, in real time. Corrective actions will be implemented when possible, otherwise diagnostic data will be collected to aid in further analysis, when there is no way to fix the non-working database.

There is another new feature in relation to ADDM, and this is known as Compare Period ADDM. Rather than comparing two periods of AWR snapshots and just taking a statistical look at what's different, Compare Period ADDM goes one step further and executes the ADDM engine on top of the AWR snapshots. This will do a detailed analysis of the differences in performance between the two periods and the possible reasons why things are different. For example, if you feel the database is slower one day and faster on another, this new feature of Compare Period ADDM will help you understand why it is so.

DBAs will also be impressed by Active Session History (ASH) analytics in this version. This is a much more powerful and more flexible reimplementation of the Top Activity functionality from the previous versions of Enterprise Manager. The wait classes can now be viewed as a tree-map structure, and it is possible to analyze performance data by various dimensions such as top SQL, top sessions, active sessions, and wait classes. In the earlier versions, you could only have a limited view of metrics by the dimensions of top Sessions and top SQL.

For backup purposes, that very important aspect of the DBA's worklife, there is a brand new deployment procedure called system backup. This allows the DBA to back up multiple databases and files and directories from multiple servers at the same time. The procedure can back up the database using RMAN and, optionally, also back up the respective database's home—files and folders are backed up using Oracle Secure Backup.

The caveat is that the back up of multiple databases will only work with database versions 10.2 and above. Lower versions such as 10.1 and 9g can still be backed up from their database Target home pages, as was possible in the previous Enterprise Manager 11g or Enterprise Manager 10g.

There is a newly-combined Database Lifecycle Management Pack. This encompasses configuration management, provisioning, patch automation, and change management. These used to be separate packs in past releases.

In short, configuration management enables you to capture and centralize information about all the hardware and software resources, enables historical change tracking, and also includes security compliance plus configuration rules and violations.

Provisioning and patch automation allows deployment of Oracle software, applications and patches. You can provision the entire software stack, including the OS, middleware, and the database. You can patch the OS and the database. Beginning with Bundle Patch 1, which was released in February 2012, you can also patch your WebLogic Server (WLS) environments. Note that WLS provisioning and patching requires the separate license of the WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE).

Change management allows the capture and comparison of metadata (dictionary) definitions, which in real life keep changing across application releases. This includes schema objects, users, and privileges. You can track changes in a single database or compare multiple databases; you can reverse-engineer the database and schema definitions, capture and version baselines, compare databases and schemas or baselines, and propagate schema changes to multiple databases using synchronization.

We will learn about most of these features of the Database Lifecycle Management Pack in other chapters of this book. But coming back to the striking new features, I would like to mention at this point that the change management features have been enhanced with the addition of Change Plans that can be used by developers to capture their database's schema-level changes and send it to the DBA for approval and execution, either via Enterprise Manager or the free Oracle SQL Developer available on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN) website (technet.oracle.com).

This considerably automates the change management flow and is a welcome addition. In Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, you can see this by going to the home page of the particular Target database, and then going to Schema | Change Management | Schema Change Plans. Here, you (or the developer) can create the Change Plan and populate it with change items, and this Change Plan can then be deployed.

Change management also includes, for the first time, a comparison of actual data in tables, and this is primarily intended for small tables such as seed data tables or configuration data tables. This makes it easier to compare such tables in different databases or schemas. This is done by selecting Schema | Change Management | Data Comparisons from the particular database's Target home page. Note that the caveat is that the reference database must be version 11g or later; this database is the one that will actually execute the comparison. The candidate database must be version 10g or later.

The configuration capabilities have been considerably improved in the new Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. The previously separate Application Change Console (ACC), Configuration Change Console (CCC), and BEA Guardian tool have all been integrated into the main Enterprise Manager. This means there is only one Agent, console and repository for these tools, which were previously installed separately.

If there are any configuration exceptions, they will now appear in the incident console like any other alert. Previously, any violation of a configuration policy did not raise alerts, now it will do so. The configuration information from Enterprise Manager can also be pushed to any external Configuration Management Database (CMDB), if there is any. On the other hand, the external CMDB information can also be brought into Enterprise Manager and integrated with the configuration information there. There is also good integration of the configuration management capabilities of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c with My Oracle Support. Custom configuration collections can also be created in this release.

With regards to the compliance capabilities of the Database Lifecycle Management Pack, there is now a new hierarchy of compliance in the Cloud Control 12c version. This replaces the compliance policies and policy groups that were there in the previous version.

At the bottom of the hierarchy, we now have compliance rules. These are checks or tests performed against a specific type of Target. One example is to check if a database or OS parameter is set as per best practices. On the second rung of the hierarchy, we have compliance standards, which are a collection of one or more rules for certain types of Target, and these standards can be associated with multiple Targets.

Compliance frameworks glue together all the various compliance standards for different types of Targets, and are at the highest rung of the hierarchy. These are conceptual folder-like structures that are used for the mapping of the configuration standards to the real-world frameworks such as PCI, CIS, and Exadata configuration. A good number of compliance rules and standards are shipped out of the box with Enterprise Manager and are mapped to these frameworks.

This is as per the industry standard model. Compliance frameworks assist DBAs, administrators, and IT managers in creating associated rules and standards, and after this is done, the auditors and security and compliance officers can utilize the frameworks to generate their compliance reports—of which there is a rich set.

It is also possible to define your own compliance standards in a vertical perspective for a system or application, or you can define compliance standards in a horizontal perspective for various industry frameworks such as HIPAA, COBIT, SOX, and so on.

Another striking new feature is the new Test Data Management Pack. This allows data subsetting via Enterprise Manager for the first time. This is done by going to Schema | Data Subsetting on the home page of the Target's database. As can be seen by the workflow in the following screenshot, first you define the application model by reverse-engineering the database, and then you define the subset tables or columns and also the subset conditions:

As a result, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c automates the procedure of creating a smaller database for test or development, which is a subset of the database used for production. For example, you can create a test database with only 3 months of data in the invoice tables rather than the 3 years that is in the production database, provided there is an invoice date column to define the subset on.

For sensitive column discovery, Enterprise Manager has a new feature called Data Discovery and Modeling (DDM), which lets you do sensitive data discovery. This is based on executing PL/SQL and regular expression pattern matching and, as such, is only possible on Oracle databases. This can be accessed by going to Enterprise | Quality Management | Data Discovery and Modeling. This is a part of the Data Masking Pack. You can also import from prebuilt data-masking templates for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications, to get a list of all the sensitive columns in these applications.

Another feature in this new release is the integration of Real Application Testing (RAT) with Data Masking. If there is any sensitive data in the the files created by RAT and captured by the workload, or in the SQL tuning sets, it is also masked by the same masking templates that are used for the actual source data. This means a workload can be captured and executed on a test database that has similarly masked data. This protects the sensitive information while testing with RAT.

There is a new Auto Discovery capability using the IP scan (NMAP) functionality on single or multiple hosts, this is a true Agent-less discovery that scans your network and discovers the hosts on that network, along with some clever guesses about the software running on those hosts.

When this completes, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c brings up a list of discovered unmanaged Targets that can then be selected by the DBA and promoted as managed Targets. This promotion then leads to the installation of the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Agent by pushing it to the Target.

The configuration information about the Target is then discovered in detail by the Agent. This makes it a lot easier to discover unmanaged assets throughout the enterprise, and manage them via Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. The following screenshot demonstrates this:

Metric extensions allow you to define your own metrics for any Target's type, for the first time. These replace the user-defined metrics in the previous releases, which were only applicable for certain Target types such as database, listener, and host.

This includes lifecycle support for metrics, including versioning of these extensions. It is also possible to migrate your previously created user-defined metrics to metric extensions.

There have been a lot of alerts and notification events coming from Enterprise Manager in the past, and with a large Target infrastructure, it has become more and more difficult for Administrators to manage so many detailed events. Experience has taught us that many events that have occurred may have had the same underlying root cause, so in the new release there is an incident manager system that manages the small number of incidents. Using this, you can identify, resolve, and remove the root causes of the underlying problems in a more efficient manner, and by business priority.

The Incident Manager (accessed via Enterprise | Monitoring | Incident Manager) is a centralized console to manage all the incidents across the enterprise from the entire Target subsystem. All incidents can be viewed, managed, diagnosed, and resolved. Lifecycle operations for incidents are supported. This includes assigning any incidents to other administrators who become the owners. You can acknowledge, prioritize, or suppress incidents and track their status. Escalation is also possible.

This new idea of incidents allows you to concentrate on the high-level incidents instead of individual events. An incident may be defined as a significant event by itself, or it can be defined as a combination of events which are all caused by the same root issue.

For example, when a Target is down, this can be defined as a significant event. Whereas, if there is a space issue in the system, there will be related events about the lack of space from various Targets such as the storage, server, as well as the database—and all these events can be grouped together as a "lack-of-space" incident. In Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, it is possible to create your own incident rules, and in this way you can combine events together to form a new incident. Another example is the combining of various metric alerts to create a performance incident, and so on. Other events you can use in this way are job events, availability events, standards violation events, and so on.

The following screenshot shows the Incident Manager in action:

The Incident Manager is integrated with MOS to accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of these incidents. You can easily create service requests and examine knowledge articles related to the incident. It is also possible to integrate the incident management system with external ticketing systems such as Remedy helpdesk, so as to see the status of the help tickets raised for these Enterprise Manager incidents.

A Consolidation Planner is now available for the first time as part of the Base Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c release, this uses the historical metric data (CPU, memory, storage, and so on), collected by Cloud Control from the various Targets. The Consolidation Planner helps you decide which existing database and application servers can be consolidated, taking into consideration business and technical constraints. For example, a constraint may state that development and production databases should not be placed on the same consolidated server.

Based on all this information along with the constraints, the Consolidation Planner produces a recommended consolidation plan to assist in consolidation of underutilized servers to a lesser number of servers, that is, Physical to Physical (P2P), or migration of physical infrastructure to virtual machines, that is, Physical to Virtual (P2V).

One example of the former can be moving from current IBM servers to new SUN or Linux servers or even Exadata, and an example of P2V would be when you move from an existing physical infrastructure to virtual machines, namely Oracle VM.

Thus, the Consolidation Planner can enable an efficient use of the resources by the identification of consolidation opportunities in the manner just described. There are manifold benefits of consolidation of course, such as lower capital, maintenance, administration, energy and floor space costs of servers, and so on.

The following screenshot shows the Consolidation Planner in action. This is after a planning project has been set up by going to Enterprise | Consolidation planner, and analysis has been completed. The resource utilization of the various servers to be consolidated is displayed on a color coded basis, showing the underutilized and heavily-utilized data points. Again, a welcome addition to Enterprise Manager—but note that you still need to make your own consolidation decisions. The Consolidation Planner is to be treated as a mathematical advisor that is based on OS-level metrics:

Installation of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c has also been simplified, with the WebLogic Server (WLS) installation included as part of the Enterprise Manager install, instead of having to manually preinstall WLS before installing Enterprise Manager. We will go through a quick installation in the coming sections.

Managing Exadata- and Exalogic-engineered systems with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is also a lot more powerful, with the help of advanced lifecycle management capabilities. There are a number of enhancements in this area of engineered systems. For example, you are able to discover the Exadata storage cells and Infiniband network and switches out of the box, and see an integrated view of the hardware and software in Enterprise Manager.

You can monitor and administer the storage cells and set up I/O Resource Manager (IORM) via Enterprise Manager to control the disk I/O utilization by any database.

You can manage the Infiniband network and monitor all the other components of the Exadata machine, such as the ILOM, Cisco Switch, KVM, and PDU. You can use the brand new Consolidation Planner in Enterprise Manager to get an idea of which of your existing servers can be consolidated with Exadata.

The SQL monitoring feature of the Tuning Pack and other performance pages in Enterprise Manager are now Exadata-aware, showing the Cell Offload Efficiency (the more the better) and the Cell Smart Table Scan. Full configuration management via Enterprise Manager is possible for Exadata, with the ability to compare configurations of the entire Exadata database machines, database servers, or storage cells. We will look at Exadata management in more detail in a later chapter.

And of course, we have the new Cloud management capabilities of the Cloud Management Pack as discussed earlier. These build on the foundation of the Database Lifecycle Management Pack or WebLogic Server Management Pack EE (either of these is required as a prerequisite, depending on the type of Cloud), and provide self service, metering, and chargeback facilities. You can set up, deliver, and manage the Cloud using Enterprise Manager in all these tasks, whether it be the IaaS, DBaaS, or PaaS type of Cloud infrastructure using Oracle VM pools, Oracle databases, or middleware.

Of course, you may or may not use Exadata- and/or Exalogic-engineered systems to achieve this level of Cloud management and lifecycle management of both your databases and middleware. Exadata and/or Exalogic is optional, but highly recommended.

In Enterprise Manager 11g, we had the combined Application Management Suites (AMS) that are integrated management solutions for managing sophisticated applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. There is a suite available for each of these.

Each of these suites combines capabilities for the respective application management, configuration management, end user management using Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), and the respective RUEI application accelerator into one single comprehensive product. In the case of the application management suite for Oracle E-Business Suite, in addition it also includes features of application change management for Oracle E-Business Suite, such as the ability to manage patches, customizations, and configuration data.

But what's new in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c for the application management suites? First of all, an Applications Management Pack as well as an Applications Management Suite for Fusion applications has been released.

For all the applications, you can leverage the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c enhancements, such as Metric Extensions (the ability to attach metrics to any Target type), Administration Groups, the use of BI Publisher, configuration management and compliance, for example, the latter capabilities are more robust in the 12c version with the ability to detect real-time changes via the Base EM Release itself, without installing separate software (as in the previous release). With this, you can have an automatic notification on a drift detection in any configuration aspect of your application.

A new feature called Oracle Site Guard is now available. This can be used to control the failover of the entire application, that is, for disaster-protection automation. Oracle Site Guard is licensed under the Database Lifecycle Management Pack for the database layer, and the Weblogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE) for the WLS layer. This feature is documented at the following URL:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/doc.1111/e15250/site_guard.htm

There are more new features in Fusion middleware management as well, such as the new Middleware Diagnostics Advisory. This is similar to the functionality of the database-side ADDM. It provides assistance in the diagnosis of performance issues in WebLogic servers, by looking at the metric data and configuration properties. Recommendations are then generated, which will help you to improve performance in the middleware tier.

There are other new application performance management and coherence-management features too. For a complete official list of new features, you can refer to the New Features In Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c chapter in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction manual at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/doc.121/e25353/whats_new.htm#CEGIFFGA