OCI Ops Insights' latest enhancements in Capacity Planning and integrations with OCI services

Contributors:  Chris Gurley,  Santiago Bravo, Manasa Kambala, Bobo Ye

OCI Ops Insights (OPSI), part of the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management platform, is a solution that helps reduce enterprise capital expenditure and improve applications throughput through data-driven capacity planning and performance management. OPSI is enhanced on a continuous basis. This blog details the latest feature additions.

View/Download AWR Reports in Ops Insights Database Capacity Planning

You can now view and download Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) Reports directly from the Ops Insights interface, making your performance analysis easier than ever before. You no longer need to switch between platforms or log in to your database to access the AWR Reports.  Whether you’re analyzing CPU usage, memory, storage, or I/O metrics, the last thing you want is the extra step of logging into your database to retrieve AWR Reports. Now, when you’re analyzing metrics in OPSI Capacity Planning, you can instantly view or download AWR Reports with just a few clicks.

While analyzing the trends, if there is a point of time that you are interested in, you could filter by that time for the selected database and view or download the required report from the list of available reports.

Selectively disable and enable database collections

If you are concerned about storing certain data in the cloud or the performance implication of certain collections, you now have the ability to disable specific collections performed by Ops Insights. The following is the list of collections which can now be easily disabled either at the tenancy-level or on a per-compartment basis:

• Database ADDM collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating ADDM Spotlight.
• Database ASH SQL collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating Oracle SQL Warehouse.
• Database AWR collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating Capacity Planning AWR reports.
• Database SQL plan collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating the SQL plans within SQL Warehouse (and within SQL Insights in the future).
• Database SQL stats collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating SQL Insights.
• Database SQL text collection: Disabling this collection will stop populating SQL text within SQL Warehouse and SQL Insights.

These configurations can be updated by navigating to Ops Insights, then Administration, and then the Service Configurations page. You can use a category filter on this page to filter on the "Customer controlled collection" configurations.

Convenient full-feature enablement from Autonomous Database page

The full-feature set for Ops Insights can now be conveniently enabled directly from within the Autonomous Database page. As a reminder, the full-feature set provides valuable applications such as:

• SQL Insights
  • SQL Explorer (free-form exploration of SQL Insights data)
• ADDM Spotlight
• DB Performance

The steps are simple:

1. Navigate to the details page of the Autonomous Database.
2. Under Associated Services, locate Ops Insights and, if your database is already enabled for Ops Insights, choose Enable full features, otherwise choose Enable.

Enhancements to viewing cost in Capacity Planning

The "view cost feature" within Capacity Planning has been enhanced in a number of ways to make viewing the cost and comparing to the current usage much easier. The two main enhancements made are:

1. The "Use list price" checkbox is added to help you select the default unit price as shown in the figure below; Note: the unit price input box will disabled if list price is checked. If a customized price is desired, or the current resource is not a Cloud resource, uncheck this option and manually insert a unit price to view the estimated cost of usage, allocation and unused allocation. The customized selections will also be cached for future use.
2. Changing the currency will reset the unit price to the selected currency default pricing, and will automatically check the "Use list price" checkbox, as the current list price in the selected currency will be pulled based on the configuration of the current resource selected.

In addition to cost configuration updates, the trend and forecasting usage cost chart now also shows the allocation cost as a dotted blue line which is calculated based on the configured unit price, as seen below:

Insights integrated into the Database Management service

SQL Insights and Capacity Planning features can now be viewed directly within the OCI Database Management service. While on the managed database details page, note the two new tabs, SQL Insights under Performance and Capacity Planning, under Management. You can now enjoy ML-driven insights directly from Database Management.

Advanced widget editing within console with JSON Editor

The Ops Insights Data Explorers now support a JSON Editor in all OPSI Explorers. With the JSON Editor, OPSI Explorer can now open all saved searches (including complex saved searches not supported by the out-of-box query builders or visualization panel) inside the explorer. Users can edit the metadata directly within the UI, view the changes, and save them without losing the customizations. Here are some of the details of the JSON Editor features:

1. When enabling the JSON Editor, you can now can view and edit the metadata of current searches.

   

2. JSON Editor supports more visualizations such as treemap, cigar chart, gauge, and label which are not yet available in the visualization selector. You can now use the JSON Editor to update the UI config (the JSON metadata which controls the saved search visualization) in order to use these charts. In addition, for the supported visualization types, the existing visualization panel allows for configuring a limited set of properties. For example, for a table visualization, users can only select the columns to show in the table. But by using the JSON Editor, you can customize properties such as CSS styles, column header name, add icon to the table, create drilldown links, add a link to show a drawer saved search upon click, and many more. 
3. If you want to query data from multiple data sources and add transformations to the data, you can now use the JSON Editor to update the data config of the current metadata and create extremely powerful widgets.

Analyzing Host IO Metrics

Ops Insights Host Capacity Planning now supports collection and analysis of Host IO Metrics like:

• Total IOPS
• Reads and Writes in MB/sec
• Percentage change over the analyzed period 

As with all other performance metrics, Ops Insights provides trend and forecast view for IO for a host which can be further analyzed by filesystem mount point. This feature is available for OCI Computes and external hosts managed via OCI Management Agent.

Get started today!

Find OPSI under the Observability and Management menu in the Oracle Cloud Console. The service is accessible through the Console, CLI, and REST API and is already available in all commercial regions, with Government regions coming soon. OPSI is available to use with Autonomous Databases, external databases (Oracle Databases deployed on-premises), and Oracle Cloud Databases on bare metal, VMs, and Exadata Database Services on Dedicated Infrastructure and Exadata Cloud at Customer.

Use the newly launched OCI Generative AI powered Oracle Support Digital Assistant to eliminate the need to manually search through the O&M documentation.  The Support Digital Assistant provides quick, accurate answers directly within the OCI console interface. In addition to the answering the query, it also provides references and links to exact sections of our comprehensive product documentation. Learn more about it here.

To test drive this feature and many other features in OPSI before even signing up for the service, try the demo mode or try it by signing up for Livelabs.

Not yet a customer?  Sign up for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trial account!

Resources

• Explore Ops Insights
• Observability and Management - Ops Insights blog space
• Ops Insights Technical Content
  • Hands-on lab: Get Started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ops Insights 
  • Ops Insights Videos, including "How-to" videos
  • Integrating Enterprise Manager with OCI Services
• Pricing 
• Learn About OPSI ADDM Spotlight 
• Enable Cross-Service Dashboards.
• OCI Data Regions