Federation Dashboard: Consolidate Multiple Enterprise Manager Deployments into Actionable Insights

July 8, 2021 | 6 minute read
Timothy Mooney
Director, Product Marketing
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Primary Author: Samir Bhagwat
Director of Software Development - Oracle Enterprise Manager

A common request I hear from customers is the need to roll up data from multiple Enterprise Manager instances into a single view, to monitor and evaluate the status of databases across regions, applications, or configured groups. The Enterprise Manager federation capability is designed for that purpose and has been included since version 13.4 Release Update 4 (RU4). The good news is, there are no additional plug-ins or software installations needed to use it. Federation dashboards provide users a single pane of glass to monitor and drill down into details to triage and manage across all Federated EM sites by geographies or business units.

See more in the webinar. Realtime Federation For Extreme Database Monitoring (Youtube)

Once an EM instance is configured as primary, EM Federation Dashboard is an option in the EM Enterprise menu as shown in the screenshot below. I will provide more details on how to configure the primary EM in the EM Configuration section discussed below.

Federation Dashboards Overview

The EM Federation Dashboard aggregates EM instances and summarizes target status, incidents, problems, and jobs across them in real-time. Dashboards are displayed by site or by a group. Each dashboard also provides context-specific drill-downs.

By Sites Tab

 Selecting the “By Sites tab gives a bird’s-eye view of your whole enterprise.  In some cases, it is desirable to filter the data by a group you are interested in. Let’s say you are a DB admin and interested in only a few select groups. Use the filter dropdown menu to choose the interested group where you want to drill down further. Using the “By Group” tab, you can now click to view the group you created.  The configuration of groups is described below in the configuration section.

In the above screenshot, there are 4 EMs “IN-South”, “US-North”, “US-South” & “US-West” and 3 groups are registered i.e. “Prod Databases”, “DevOps Databases” & “ERP Databases”. Say you want to view just the “Prod Database” group. You select it from the dropdown and the dashboard refreshes with “Prod Database” as shown below.

Further, you want to triage the 1 critical incident in “IN-South”, so you click on the “1” taking you into the “IN-South” EM site in the context of your selected group and selected incident severity to see more details about this incident. The screenshot below shows a tablespace incident above the critical threshold for the “SalesDB” database. Now you can manage this important incident to avoid any outages to this database and eventually the application.

This use case highlights how we started with the Federated bird’s-eye view of the whole enterprise, then double-clicked on the group with a critical incident to triage and eventually managed that specific incident.

By Groups Tab

We have another dashboard “By Groups”, if you are mainly interested in consolidated information of all configured groups across EMs then this is the dashboard that you will be interested in.

From this dashboard, one can click on the Group name to view the dashboard in the context of the selected group.

Role-Based Access Control

The Federation Dashboard respects the role-based access control configured at the individual EM instance for the users, so the user will only see the data they have access to. In the above example, the logged-in user is “samir” with access to “SalesDB” database, hence he was able to see the tablespace incident. Let’s say we have another user, “zubair”, who does not have access to the “SalesDB” database. The incident data won’t be shown when “zubair” logs in, as seen below:

How to Configure Federated EM Sites and Groups

To use Federation, an EM instance must be set as a Primary site, then instances must be registered to that Primary site. Configuring the Primary EM is a one-time activity and registering Federated EMs into the Primary EM is done by a Super Administrator. Each individual user will need to associate their credentials to each EM Site they are interested in to fetch data in their federation dashboard.

Configuring a Primary EM Site

Any EM version 13.4 Release Update 5 (RU5) and above can be used as a Primary EM and the following emctl property needs to be set for it in order to become a Primary EM.

emctl set property –name “oracle.sysman.federation.masterEM” –value true

Adding Federated EM Sites to the Primary EM Site

Any EM 13.4 and above sites can be added as a Federated EM. To add a list of Enterprise Manager sites, you can use any REST API tool. The below examples use cURL command line tool to add “EU-Site” into the Primary EM:

curl -X POST https://primaryEM.oracle.com/em/websvcs/restful/fed/emSites -u 'sysman’ -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '

{"siteURL":"https://eu-site.oracle.com",

"name": "EU-Site"}'

The response to the above command will return a unique ID for the EM site.  This ID will be needed to add a certificate or link credentials to a specific EM.  For the above example, the ID is  “422cf85c13354336874a1971c1d57a70” for the “EU-Site”.

Importing a Certificate in the Primary EM Trust Store (Optional)

To allow HTTPS connectivity to other Enterprise Manager sites, the Enterprise Manager administrator imports the Federated Enterprise Manager sites certificates into the Primary Enterprise Manager site's trust store. This step is required for self-signed certificates. The administrator needs to ensure the certificates provided are PEM encoded (DER encoded certificates are not supported).

The following is an example of using cURL command line tool to import a certificate:

curl -X POST https://primaryEM.oracle.com/em/websvcs/restful/fed/emSites/422cf85c13354336874a1971c1d57a70/certificates -u 'user1' -H 'content-type: multipart/form-data' -F file=@em_site1.pem

Creating Credentials for EM Login

For connecting to the Federated EM you would need to first create a credential. The following example uses a cURL command to create credential samir , which is an EM repository user.
curl -X POST https://primary_em.sample.com:5416/em/websvcs/restful/fed/credentials -u 'samir’' -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '
{"userName": "samir",
"password": "samir",
"name": "default"}'

The API will return a unique ID for this credential which will be needed to link the credential to EM Site below. For the above example, we got the credential ID  3f1e2492016740f9aae9d2647d09efb0.


Linking User Credentials to an EM Site

After the credentials are created, you need to link the user credentials to the Federated Enterprise Manager site. The Enterprise Manager Federation dashboard uses the user credentials to retrieve data from the Federated Enterprise Manager site using the value of the EM Site ID.  Below is a cURL command to link the credential just created for user “samir” to link to the newly added “EU-Site”.

curl -X POST https://primaryEM.oracle.com/em/websvcs/restful/fed/emSites/422cf85c13354336874a1971c1d57a70/credential -u 'samir' -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"id":3f1e2492016740f9aae9d2647d09efb0}'

Adding a Group to Federation

The group-based functionality needs the Primary EM to be on the upcoming version 13.5 Release Update 1 (RU1) and above and any Federated EM to be version 13.4 Release Update 9 (RU9). To add a group “Finance DB”, use the following cURL command :

curl -X POST https://primaryEM.oracle.com/em/websvcs/restful/fed/composites -u 'superadmin' -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '

{ "targetName":"Finance DB",

    "targetType":"composite"}

That covers common use cases when using Federation.

For more information on setting up and using EM Federation, see the following documentation and resources:

 

 

Timothy Mooney

Director, Product Marketing

Experience across business development, product management, product marketing in computer hardware to cloud services.

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