It’s Fundamental – Oracle Enterprise Manager Livelab for Hybrid Management of Oracle Databases and Technology

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides deep monitoring as a foundation for observability of all components of the IT infrastructure, applications, and services on-premises and in the cloud. Its key capabilities include user experience, performance, change and configuration management, patching, provisioning, integrated diagnostics, testing, and automatic tuning. Now, it’s easier to try some of them out and gain hands-on experience with them using Oracle LiveLabs.

To help our busy customers keep up on the latest technology and capabilities, we’ve created an on-demand workshop environment on Oracle LiveLabs with hands-on lab exercises built by Enterprise Manager experts. You can access the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fundamentals workshop directly or by searching for it by name from the Oracle LiveLabs catalog.

In this blog, I’m going to overview the available labs you can try and see how their capabilities help you justify and get more budget for a solution that makes your job easier. 

Lab Environment Setup

No longer do you have to find an extra server or storage at your site to install a new version of Enterprise Manager to try out. Using the power of the Oracle Cloud and the  EM 13.5 Oracle Cloud Marketplace image or Oracle Enterprise Manager Fundamentals workshop on LiveLabs, following lab activities 1 -3, you can have a fully running Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5 environment in approximately 20 minutes.

Multitenant Database Lifecycle Management

Whether you are in a situation where you’re not allowed to use public cloud services or want to set-up self-service abilities in your existing environment to speed up or offload repeating requests, Enterprise Manager Database Lifecycle Management (DBLM) can help. 

Enterprise Manager DBLM comes with out-of-box deployment procedures to provision, clone, and patch various configurations of the Oracle Database. It provides new capabilities that simplify support for the entire lifecycle of pluggable databases, including migration, plugging, and unplugging from the self-service portal, PDB patching and upgrades, and PDB relocation to new platforms.

In Lab 4 you learn how to enable self-service users to request Pluggable Database (PDB) for testing, and perform other lifecycle operations like Clone, Plug/Unplug, etc… You will also learn the ease of provisioning, resizing, and deleting a PDB using a self-service interface. View the video on how to standardize and automate Oracle Databases on Exadata.

Find and Fix Database Performance Issues

Oracle Databases have deep instrumentation and automatic telemetry collection built in. Oracle Enterprise Manager Diagnostics and Tuning packs make use of that to provide important database performance diagnostics, tuning and insight – capabilities that no other tool or scripts can provide. 

This lab helps you become familiar with some of the latest Performance Hub abilities. Performance Hub provides you a single pane of glass to view database performance with access to Active Session History (ASH) Analytics, Real-time SQL Monitoring and SQL Tuning. View the video on Oracle Database Performance and Tuning best practices. 

Patching Oracle Databases

A DBA is only able to manage a number of databases “safely” manually and that number varies by a number of factors like the environment, amount of data, complexity, etc.. Businesses either need to hire more DBAs or automate so that existing staff can accomplish more. “Safely” means within regular working hours and completing all the tasks to keep databases available, maintained and secured. 

Automation is a core capability and while some tasks might be automated manually, there are some you are only able to automate at scale by using Enterprise Manager Database Lifecycle Management capabilities that are built-in to every Oracle Database. You don’t have to increase risks or compromise your databases, you will experience first-hand how the Oracle Enterprise Manager DBLM pack leverages integration already built-in to your Oracle Database to automate and scale operations. Database Fleet Maintenance enables DBAs and others to automate patching, upgrade, and maintenance of a wide range of Oracle Database standards and complex configurations.

Lab 6 helps you tackle an all-too-common business problem, “How can we keep all our Oracle Databases patched, secured, and protected?” View the video to see how automated patching improves security of Oracle Databases. 

Migration of Oracle Databases

DBA's are limited in their abilities to manage databases manually therefore, businesses should automate so existing staff can accomplish more. Enterprise Manager Database Lifecycle Management capabilities are designed into every Oracle Database.  Lab 7 helps you tackle a common business problem using built-in capabilities to answer “How can we upgrade and keep all our Oracle Databases at the same release level?" View the video on migrating Oracle Databases with minimal downtime.

Configuration Management and Compliance of Oracle Databases

Changes to configuration properties of database and host targets invariably happen. At some point, a change to one component can affect the overall application or system in a negative way.  Detecting the root cause becomes critical especially when availability, performance or security is impacted.

Using Enterprise Manager Database Lifecycle Management configuration management capabilities, you can automate continuous monitoring and tracking of configuration drift of targets against the reference configuration across the data center and cloud. DBLM compliance management functionality automates and performs, continuous security checks based on industry standards and best practices. Industry requirements from the Center for Internet Security (CIS), Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) can all be addressed by implementing DBLM capabilities.

Lab 8 helps you answer the common business question “what changed and where?”, and shows you one way you can attest to an auditor that you are managing your databases to industry-standard best practices. View the video on securing Oracle Database configurations to Center for Internet Security (CIS) and other industry standards.

Schedule Routine Oracle Database Tasks

There are routine administrative tasks like backups, SQL scripts, environment housekeeping scripts and OS jobs that often become scattered among the different database systems and environments. For instance, CRON may be handy to use initially but administrators and DBAs inevitably need a job management system to run and manage them more efficiently.

Using the Enterprise Manager Job System, you schedule and automate commonly run tasks and manage them all from one place. It helps administrative tasks (backup, cloning, patching…), enables you to create jobs using your own custom OS and SQL scripts, and performs multi-task jobs comprised of multiple tasks.

Gain some hands-on experience with the EM Job System capability in Lab 9 and try it out to help with a common database administration task: scheduling regular backups of a database. View the video to automate routine tasks using integration with 3rd party systems.

Testing Oracle Database Performance

For development work, you try to set up your environment to be like what you have in production.  Often, it’s incomplete or much smaller in size or processing power because of cost or the availability of a spare system. While testing and QA are performed, the different environment and processing variables leave you guessing on how it will actually run in production. You may be faced with a database migration from a legacy system to the cloud, and you’re trying to capture, replay, and test a workload to assess the impact of changes.

Oracle Real Application Testing enables you to perform real testing of Oracle Databases before, during, and after production deployment. By capturing production workloads and assessing the impact of system changes on these workloads before going into production, Oracle Real Application Testing minimizes the risk of instabilities associated with database and system changes.

Gain hands-on experience with Oracle Real Application Testing SQL Performance Analyzer and Database Replay capabilities in Lab 10 to validate the performance of an Oracle Database before and then after replay. View the video on best practices to validate performance before committing updates, upgrades and migrations.

Monitoring Oracle Databases

When databases get deployed you want to know if they are up and operating properly and be notified of any issues. Once you have set all that up for one database, continuing to do that manually or individually, database by database, is a waste of time and keeps the business waiting.  Just as you setup a database for monitoring, another database appears, and you’re stuck in an endless cycle of doing nothing but that.

Oracle Enterprise Manager enables you to automate monitoring and gain full visibility into your IT infrastructure, applications stack, and applications critical to your business. From a single pane of glass you are able to monitor databases on-premises and in the cloud, perform automated discovery of databases, and start monitoring right away with predefined performance and health metrics. Should there be an issue, alerting, incident management, and notification capabilities notify you as well as send it to your ticketing system.

In Lab 11, explore a summary view of your databases and see how you can drill down on database details and see open incidents. Then, experience corrective actions to resolve incidents, templates groups to implement and maintain a monitoring standard, metric extensions to monitor more, and set up incident rules to direct notification to a variety of resources. View the video on federating Oracle Database monitoring across the Oracle stack and the Enterprise.

To Learn More About Oracle Enterprise Manager Capabilities

Check the resources listed. 
•   Enterprise Manager demo series playlist on YouTube
•   Enterprise Manager blog series
•   Product page on Oracle.com
•   Blog:  Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Release 5 Update 2 (13.5.0.3) Is Now Available!
•   Product Documentation