Oracle Management Agent supports a versatile and secure collection of full-stack observability data from diverse sources. It is designed to support multiple platforms and can be installed with various installation packages on all operating systems, such as on Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris, and MACOS. For on-premises environments, the agent is deployed on a virtual machine or a pod and securely sends data to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). For OCI Compute, Oracle Management Agent is part of the OCI machine image and can be enabled with a single click. Data collection on behalf of OCI observability services can be scheduled or on-demand. Oracle Management Agent’s extensible architecture allows it to dynamically deploy new collections from different service plugins.

Data transportation via Oracle Management agent is highly secured and powered by OCI Identity’s authentication and authorization. Any communication from Oracle Management Agent to OCI can only be initiated from the agent.

 

Oracle Management Agent data sources & collection methods

Oracle Management Agent supports a rich set of sources and ingestion methods to ensure all infrastructure and applications observability data is collected. Figure 1 shows the range of dynamic ingestion methods for real-time data collection, including Prometheus scrapping and Kubernetes APIs. The different types of collections exhibit the versatility of the Oracle Management Agent capabilities. It allows applications and infrastructure resources to keep sending critical monitoring data to the observability platform which helps ensure necessary actions are taken to avoid business interruptions.

Ingestion methods
Figure 1:  Data sources and collection methods

Oracle Management Agent is used by the following OCI Observability and Management services for data collection 

 

  • Application Performance Monitoring: OCI Application Performance Monitoring provides observability for end-to-end visibility and diagnosis across the entire IT environment. Using distributed transaction tracing, it connects user experiences with underlying technology to automate problem identification and diagnosis with a business-centric approach.
  • Stack Monitoring: OCI Stack Monitoring enables comprehensive monitoring of all components of your application infrastructure. It discovers the full stack including hosts, databases, application servers, and more. Its interactive UI enables easy troubleshooting and uses machine learning to identify performance anomalies. Stack Monitoring has an extensible framework that supports custom metrics and monitoring of any resource type.
  • Logging Analytics: OCI Logging Analytics is a machine learning-based cloud service that monitors, aggregates, indexes, and analyzes all log data from on-premises and multi cloud environments. It enables users to search, explore, and correlate this data to troubleshoot and resolve problems faster and derive insights to make better operational decisions.
  • Database Management: OCI Database Management provides DBAs a unified console for managing databases, on-premises or in the cloud, with comprehensive capabilities for monitoring, performance diagnostics, tuning, and administration. It uses advanced database fleet diagnostics and tuning to troubleshoot issues and optimize database and SQL performance. 
  • Ops Insights: OCI Ops Insights enables administrators to uncover performance issues, forecast consumption, and plan capacity using AI based analytics on historical and SQL data. Organizations can use these capabilities to make data-driven decisions to optimize resource use, proactively avoid outages, and improve performance.
  • OS Management Hub & Java Management Service: These services leverage Oracle Management Agent as a foundational platform. The OS Management Hub utilizes it for performing OS patching tasks, while the Java Management Service relies on it for efficient tracking of Java usage metrics.

 

Why Oracle Management Agent suits on-premises collection deployment?

Oracle Management Agent plays a crucial role in ensuring the availability, performance, and security of your environments, while also improving operational efficiency and reducing administrative overhead. It provides comprehensive features for monitoring and managing multiple infrastructure and application resources.

Here are some key features of the Oracle Management Agent, deployed in an on-premises environment:

  • Comprehensive collection: Oracle Management Agent provides the most comprehensive data collection for on-premises resources using open and standard techniques including Prometheus, JMX, JDBC, REST, O/S command, O/S files, and SQL. It collects data from multiple sources on the same host or remotely using a single agent. One agent can be deployed to collect different types of data on the host itself. It reduces agent footprint and single agents deployed on the host can be used to collect the data remotely.
    • On-Host collection for multiple entities: The agent can be deployed on multiple hosts and collects multi-source data on behalf of OCI and its observability and management services. It helps to collect data from multiple entities when large volume and high-frequency collections are needed. It reduces the agent footprint on the host and is suitable for the widest set of collections of logs from the file.

 

Figure 2: On-host data collection from multiple entities
Figure 2: On-Host data collection from multiple entities

 

  • Remote collections from multiple targets: This method helps to suffice the “no need of agent on host requirement” and allows collections of a wide set of observability data remotely from multiple entities. The single agent can collect data from hundreds of entities remotely. The type of collection includes – SQL-based metric and log collection, REST endpoints, Syslog-based log collection, and Prometheus scrapping.

 

Figure 3: Remote data collection from multiple targets
Figure 3: Remote data collection from multiple targets

 

  • Centralized management: Unlike other monitoring solutions, Oracle Management Agent provides a centralized point of control for managing applications and hardware components. This helps to reduce management overhead for all your infrastructure and strengthens the monitoring platform through fewer maintenance blackouts and downtime. It enables administrators to monitor and manage multiple instances, databases, and hosts from a single console.
  • Communication and security:  With on-premises deployments, organizations have full control over their infrastructure and data security. Oracle Management Agent Provides secure data transportation powered by OCI Identity’s authentication and authorization. All communications are aligned with OCI security policies. OCI never initiates collections communication to the agent. Only the agent can initiate communication.

 

Figure 4: Agent initiated communication to OCI
Figure 4: Oracle Management Agent to OCI communication

 

  • On-demand collection: Kick off on-demand collection tasks and receive data in as little as a minute. Supports greater efficiency and scalability for real-time monitoring.

  • Credential wallet: Oracle Management Agent provides an agent credential store for storing credentials on behalf of OCI Observability and Management services. OCI services can use the credential management tool in the agent to securely store the credentials in the agent side wallet.  Once stored, the agent provides these credentials to OCI services to enable connections to resources like databases and REST endpoints for data collection. OCI Observability and Management services can store the following types of credentials: Database TCPS credentials, HTTPS credentials (for accessing REST APIs), and authenticated proxy credentials.

  • Batch log uploads: Oracle Management Agent is supported by Management Gateway which allows batched log uploads with high resiliency and scalability. It helps in optimizing network bandwidth usage, especially in environments with limited bandwidth.
  • Agent lifecycle and dashboard: Oracle Management Agent has an intuitive UI with availability and health status of all the agents. The overview dashboard provides alarms and insights on agent activities.

 

Agents Overview
Figure 5: Agents overview dashboard

                                                     

  • Auto upgrade: Oracle Management Agent supports the auto-upgrade feature to take care of the automatic upgrade of all the agents. This opt-in feature keeps your agent on the latest version, delivering optimal performance and security enhancements with more efficacy.
  • Prometheus metrics scraping: Oracle Management Agent collects metric data from any infrastructure components that expose metric data in the Prometheus format.

Overall, Oracle Management Agent provides a robust set of features and benefits specifically designed to meet the needs of on-premises environments, enabling organizations to effectively monitor, manage, and secure their Oracle infrastructure while maintaining full control and flexibility. Key capabilities are tailored to cost optimization for monitoring on-premises environment.

 

Oracle Management Agent benefits

  • High availability: Oracle Management Agent runs as a system daemon; the system will ensure the agent keeps running. The Management Agent gateway high availability feature employs resilient data ingestion mechanisms that can handle large volumes of data from diverse sources. It has data buffering and retries ability to ensure data ingestion even in the face of network disruptions or transient failures. It was designed to utilize redundant infrastructure through multiple availability domains along with fault tolerant architectures to minimize downtime.
  • Cost optimization: Efficient use of network bandwidth can result in cost savings, especially in scenarios where network usage is metered or billed based on data transfer volumes. The batching feature allows Oracle Management Agent to optimize resource utilization, both on the agent itself and on the target OCI services. By processing logs in larger batches, the agent can make more efficient use of system resources such as CPU, memory, and disk I/O to reduce network traffic and obtain more resilient and efficient uploads to OCI.  
  • Bulk agent deployment: Oracle Management Agent automates the bulk deployment of agents for your large environment monitoring needs.

Now you can use the integrated design and secure data collection via Oracle Management Agent by onboarding to other OCI Observability and Management services for your monitoring needs. You also have the option to enable Prometheus-based collection using it. Please refer to the Oracle Management Agent documentation for more details.

For on-premises environments, it is essential to have secured and efficient data transport, along with secured access to monitoring data. Advanced users may refer to Oracle Management Agent and Gateway deployment architecture diagram to enable sending data end-to-end securely. For more details, refer to the reference architecture.

 

Mgmt agent and gateway
Figure 6: Oracle Management Agent and Gateway Architecture

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