We’re excited to announce the support for Exadata Insights in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Operations Insights. This capability supports Oracle databases monitored through Oracle Enterprise Manager. Exadata Insights service provides a holistic view of all Exadata systems across your enterprise to help optimize capacity based on proactive planning and drive database consolidation use cases.

Exadata Insights features

The OCI Operations Insights service enables business executives, database, and DevOps personnel to make informed, and data-driven compute resource and performance management decisions. With Operations Insights, you have the following capabilities:

  • Analyze resource usage of databases and hosts across the enterprise

  • Forecast future demand for resources based on historical trends

  • Compare SQL performance across databases and identify common patterns

  • Identify SQL performance trends across enterprise-wide databases

With the introduction of Exadata Insights, you can now analyze the resource utilization of the Exadata systems and identify the spare capacity for new workloads. This feature is available for Exadata systems that are managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5 RU01 and later.

Oracle Enterprise Manager allows Operations Insights to easily utilize target-level data managed by Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager lets you transfer data from Enterprise Manager targets and Oracle Management Repository to OCI Object Storage, where you can easily allow access to one or more cloud native services, such as Operations Insights and Logging Analytics.

Enterprise Manager-Operations Insights communication involves the following bridges:

  • An Enterprise Manager-side bridge to move target-level data from Enterprise Manager to OCI Object Storage bucket.

  • An Operations Insights-side bridge to move data from the OCI Object Storage bucket to Operations Insights for analysis.

After OCI connectivity is set up, your target data is automatically uploaded at frequent intervals to Object Storage, so that OCI cloud services are always working with the most recent target data.


Figure 1: Oracle Enterprise Manager and Operations Insights integration flow

Use cases

Forecast resource requirements

Using the Capacity Planning app for Exadata systems, you can perform the following analyses:

  • Enterprise-wide analysis of resource utilization, capacity planning for Exadata

  • Improve resource utilization by identifying under and overutilized resources

  • Identify Exadata systems projected to reach high utilization

  • Identify total lead time to expand capacity through machine learning-based forecast, based on long-term historic data to project future resource growth

  • Use forecasting and capacity planner functionality to ensure that Exadata satisfies future needs of databases being consolidated

  • Estimate usage after 12 months


Figure 2: Exadata Insights fleet view

Consolidate Oracle databases on Exadata

You can inspect details of individual Exadata systems and look at performance characteristics of all databases, hosts, and storage servers for the following capabilities:

  • Identify top databases by the resource type CPU, memory, I/O, and storage

  • Identify top hosts by the resource type CPU and memory

  • Identify top Exadata storage servers by storage, I/O, and throughput

  • Determine which Exadata hosts satisfy resource requirements

  • Find low resource utilization servers

  • Plan using performance history and seasonality

  • Ensure that service levels can be met over time


Figure 3: Exadata system details with photorealistic view

Conclusion

Operations Insights integrates with Oracle Enterprise Manager and simplifies onboarding for existing customers using automated collection of Enterprise Manager data and advanced analytics for Enterprise Manager targets. Systems managed by Exadata Insights for Enterprise Manager aid in consolidation and troubleshooting. You can also use the existing SQL Warehouse feature of Operations Insights for identifying unpredictable, slow, and inefficient SQL.

Exadata Insights service is available to use with Oracle Enterprise Manager managed on-premises Exadata systems. Support for Oracle Databases on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, virtual machines, bare metal, Exadata Cloud services, and Exadata Cloud at Customer is coming soon.

Sign up for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trial account! For more information about this feature and how you can use it, see the documentation.