Proactive monitoring with Oracle Grid Control

Posted by David Yahalom under ITIL, Grid Control, Monitoring, General IT, Oracle

Data centers today are becoming huge and complex. There’s a definite need to provide 24/7, always-on, high SLA services. The sheer maintenance of such complex environments can be a daunting task for any IT staff.As the complexity of systems increases, the need for better, more comprehensive monitoring solutions becomes more critical. The monitoring tools and methodologies that were once considered good-enough just don’t cut it anymore.

Knowing that servers are up and running and that the backups have finished successfully isn’t enough. Complex systems require complex monitoring methodologies taking into account complex SLAs scenarios that usually span dozens of servers and tens of connected systems.

There are two methodologies for troubleshooting system performance. You can be reactive – wait for the problems to happen and then do your best to solve them as fast as you can or be proactive – learn of potential problems and bottlenecks before they become critical and affect your business.

Being proactive has many advantages including minimizing downtime and freeing your IT staff to advance future projects rather then put out fires all day long. In the IT world staying in one place is pretty much the same as going backward.

The proactive approach is derived from identifying problems before they happen and addressing them before they become a problem for your company. You can define a set of rules, either application based rules or system based rules which will be defined as the SLA indicator for the application. These rules can be anything from “page load time” to system-oriented tests such as CPU load or blocking sessions to a combination of both. Being proactive means being alerted once the load time for a certain page in the application has exceeded a predefined threshold.

Grid Control is Oracle’s high-end, fully fledged, enterprise-wide, monitoring and management solution. Grid Control is a single, integrated solution for administering, operating and monitoring applications and systems.

While Grid Control provides has the most complete set of Oracle Database monitoring metrics from any other tool on the market today, it can also do much more as a monitoring solution beside monitor Oracle Databases only.

Grid Control provides the following capabilities and features:

1) Application Management.

2) Database Management.

3) Middleware management.

4) Real User Experience insight

5) Host / Server management

6) SOA management

7) Identity management.

Each of these features consist of both predefined metrics for evaluating system performance and availability plus the ability to create custom metrics handing over control on what specifically Grid Control monitors to you. You have the capability to group several key systems together and define a service group that is dependent on the availability and performance of all the targets belonging to that service group.

Grid Control allows for self-tuned and self managed databases, automation of complex or routine manual tasks which are often error-prone, rapid root cause analysis through established standards and complete compliance enforcement.

Using the combination of Grid Control and Oracle 10g’s ADDM feature you can periodically examines the state of the database, automatically identify potential bottlenecks and have Grid Control recommend corrective actions.

Oracle Enterprise Manager presents ADDM findings and recommendations in a convenient and intuitive fashion and guides administrators in step-by-step process to quickly resolve performance problems by implementing ADDM recommendations.

Grid Control also offers a large array of compliance assessments (with out-of-box included policies), security violation reports, patch advisories, multiple-target deployment and of course – alerts. You can have Grid Control notify you of potential problems both via email, SMS text messages and SNMP traps.

 Using GridControl for ITIL compliance

This last section of the article can be crucial to some of you looking for ITIL compliance. ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library - a widely accepted approach and methodologies to IT service management providing a complete and comprehensive set of best practice guidebooks supported by a qualifications scheme, training and implementation and assessment tools. ITIL was designed to promote the quality of computer services in the organization and provides management with a template framework for best practices to achieve quality IT services and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems. ITIL is divided into a set of text books, qualification programs, software tools and user groups slicing the services expected from an IT department:

1. Service support.

2. Service delivery.

3. Managerial.

4. Software support.

5. Computer operations.

6. Security management.

7. Environmental

So how exactly can Grid Control help you become ITIL certified?

Since Grid Control can essentially monitor everything in your DataCenter it can better help you align business aspects with your IT aspects.

 

ITIL configuration management

The basic process defined by ITIL is that of configuration management. This is essential for both service support and service delivery.

Configuration management means tracking all of the individual hardware components supporting your business IT infrastructure and all of the changes these components undertake. Grid Control tracks all of these changes in a build-in Configuration Management DB (or CMDB for short) which keeps all history data easily accessible using Grid Control’s interface.

Each one of these Configuration Items is linkable to other Configuration Items in your infrastructure. You can define a connection between servers X,Y,Z and the organization HR system. Grid Control also has the ability to automatically identify the relation between separate configuration items and greatly reduce the overhead with manually documenting and linking individual configuration items.

This allows the developer to notify the system administrator that ever since he replaced the network card in the production server the entire application is running slower than usual. Identify the change that caused the problem.

  

ITIL Problem management

Another key ITIL process is the diagnostic of reoccurring problems and failures. Reoccurring errors are usually a sign of problems that were poorly handled when they first occurred. Grid Control allows us to identify the error when it happens by using root cause analysis, helping us identify the underlying problematic configuration item thus greatly simplifying troubleshooting.

ITIL Change management

Change management in complex IT environments is all about they way your IT staff can coordinate changes in your infrastructure so that they can easily identify which systems are being affected by the proposed change. Grid Control automatically documents any change made in your business IT infrastructure. By creating “baseline snapshots” using Grid Control you can later compare your infrastructure configuration to a given point in time.

Grid Control also supports Change Automation allowing us to schedule automatic deployment of Oracle patches.

 

ITIL Release Management

ITIL release management is the ability to release final, production-grade synchronized versions of your IT system along with all of its configuration items corresponding to the various installation procedures and regulations in place.

This gives us the ability to keep a “closed” version of our configuration management (combination of hardware, O/S choice, DB version…) as a standby baseline and use this baseline to easily make future copies. Grid Control fully supports ITIL release management by allowing us to automate our deployment procedures of the entire system from the bare-metal upwards.

ITIL Capacity Management

Since both system load and capacity play critical roles in the availability and performance of your business systems, ITIL defines a process to easily manage and quantify your systems capacities. In order to predict the capacity required to support future workloads, Grid Control tracks the system performance over a period of time allowing you to slice the performance by various indicators such as user activity.

This is just a quick tour of Grid Control and really, only a drop in the sea in terms of capabilities and options at your disposal. We strongly recommend that you install Grid Control for yourself and explore the world of proactive, smart IT infrastructure monitoring and management. 

And remember…. Once you go Grid, you’ll never go back!