In a blog entry earlier this year, we
announced the availability of the Ops Center 11g plug-in for
Enterprise Manager 12c. In this article I will walk you through the
process of deploying the plug-in on your existing Enterprise Manager
agents and show you some of the capabilities the plug-in provides.
We'll also look at the integration from the Ops Center perspective.
I will show you how to set up the connection to Enterprise Manager
and give an overview of the information that is available.
Installing and Configuring the Ops
Center Plug-in
The plug-in is available for download
from the Self Update page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Self Update).
The plug-in name is “Ops Center Infrastructure stack”. Once you
have downloaded the plug-in you can navigate to the Plug-In
management page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Plug-ins) to begin
deployment. The plug-in must first be deployed on the Management
Server. You will need to provide the repository password of the SYS
user in order to deploy the plug-in to the Management Server.
There are a few pre-requisites that
need to be completed on the Ops Center side before the plug-in can be
deployed and configured on the desired Enterprise Manager agents.
Any servers, whether physical or virtual, for which you wish to see
metrics and alerts need to be managed by Ops Center. This means that
the Operating System needs to have an Ops Center management agent
installed as a minimum. The plug-in can provide even more value when
Ops Center is also managing the other “layers of the stack”, for
example the service processor, the blade chassis or the XSCF of an
M-Series server. The more information that Ops Center has about the
stack, the more information that will be visible within Enterprise
Manager via the plug-in. In order to access the information within
Ops Center, the plug-in requires a user to connect as. This user
does not require any particular Ops Center permissions or roles, it
simply needs to exist. You can create a specific “EMPlugin” user
within Ops Center or use an existing user. Oracle recommends
creating a specific, non-privileged user account within Ops Center
for this purpose. From the Ops Center Administration section, select
Enterprise Controller, click the Users tab and finally click the Add
User icon to create the desired user account.
For the purpose of this article I have
discovered and managed the OS and service processor of the server
where my Enterprise Manager 12c installation is hosted.
With the plug-in deployed to the
Management Server and the setup done within Ops Center, we're now
ready to deploy the plug-in to the agents and configure the targets
to communicate with the Ops Center Enterprise Controller. From the
Setup menu select Add Targets then Add Targets Manually. Select the
bottom radio button “Add Targets Manually by Specifying Target
Monitoring Properties”, select Infrastructure Stack from the Target
Type dropdown and finally, select the Monitoring Agent where you wish
to deploy the plug-in.
Click the Add Manually.... button and
fill in the details for the new target using the appropriate hostname
for your Enterprise Controller and the user and password details for
the plug-in access user.
After the target has been added to the
agent you will need to allow a few minutes for the initial data
collection to complete. Once completed you can see the new target in
the All Targets list. All metric collections are enabled by default
except one. To enable Infrastructure Stack Alarms collection,
navigate to the newly added target and then to Target ? Monitoring
? Metric and Collection Settings. There you can click the
“Disabled” link under Collection Schedule to enable collection
and set your desired collection frequency. By default, a Warning
level alert in Ops Center will equate to a Warning level event in
Enterprise Manager and a Critical alert will equate to a Critical
event. This mapping can be altered in the Metric and Collection
Settings also. The default incident rules in Enterprise Manager only
create incidents from Critical events so keep this in mind in case
you want to see incidents generated for Warning or Info level alerts
from Ops Center. Also, because Enterprise Manager already monitors
the OS through it's Host target type, the plug-in does not pull OS
alerts from Ops Center so as to prevent duplication.
In addition to alert propagation, the
plug-in also provides data for several reports detailing the topology
and configuration of the stack as well as any hardware sensor data
that is available. These are available from the Information
Publisher Reports. Navigate there from the Enterprise ? Reports
menu or directly from the Infrastructure Stack target of interest.
As an example, here is a sample of the
Hardware Sensors report showing some of the available sensor data.
The report can also be exported to a CSV file format if desired.
Connecting Ops Center to Enterprise Manager Repository
For an Enterprise Manager user, the plug-in provides a deeper visibility to the state of the infrastructure underlying the databases and middleware. On the Ops Center side, there is also a greater visibility to the targets running on the infrastructure. To set up the Ops Center data collection, just navigate to the Administration section and select the Grid Control link. Select the Configure/Connect action from the right-hand menu and complete the wizard forms to enable the connection to the Enterprise Manager repository and UI. Be sure to use the sysman account when configuring the database connection. Once the job completes and the initial data synchronization is done you will see new Target tabs on your OS assets. The new tab lists all the Enterprise Manager targets and any alerts, availability and performance data specific to the selected target. It is also possible to use the GoTo icon to launch the Enterprise Manager BUI in context of the specific target or alert to drill into more detail.
Hopefully this brief overview of the integration between Enterprise Manager and Ops Center has provided a jumpstart to getting a more complete view of the full stack of your enterprise systems.
