Guest Authors – Ramesh Ganesan, Karl Moser (Sonoco DBA)
In today’s digital era, businesses rely on seamless, always-available IT infrastructure to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Performance and availability are non-negotiable, and any downtime can lead to serious consequences. For a global leader like Sonoco, maintaining high-performing, resilient systems is critical to keeping manufacturing lines moving, supply chains humming, and customers satisfied.
This is where Oracle Cloud Observability and Management (O&M) proves to be a game-changer. Designed to monitor, diagnose, and optimize applications, infrastructure, and databases, O&M empowers organizations like Sonoco to stay ahead of performance issues, minimize downtime, and ensure scalability.
What Drives Sonoco: A Look Inside Its Global Operations
Sonoco Products Company, a Fortune 500 global packaging leader founded in 1899, operates in over 40 countries with more than 23,000 employees, serving customers in 85+ nations. As the world’s largest producer of consumer and industrial packaging, including paper containers, metal cans, tubes, and protective packaging, Sonoco is also a pioneer in sustainable packaging, recycling nearly 3 million tons of material annually.
To support its global operations, Sonoco has embraced a robust multi-cloud strategy leveraging Oracle, AWS, and Azure, with fully integrated enterprise systems like ERP, ASCP, WMS, and Oracle databases to drive real-time visibility and operational efficiency. For high-performance demands, the company utilizes Oracle Exadata and a large fleet of VMs, while RPA and AI-powered chatbots streamline processes and enhance productivity across business functions.
Why Oracle Cloud Observability & Management (O&M)?
O&M is a comprehensive suite of monitoring tools that offers end-to-end visibility into the performance of applications, systems, and databases. By continuously collecting and analyzing telemetry data, O&M enables teams to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot performance degradations, and optimize resources in real-time.
Integrated tightly with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), O&M is an ideal solution for cloud-native operations and hybrid environments, helping organizations monitor their tech stack from every angle. It provides complete out-of-the-box monitoring for EBS with dedicated dashboards including automatic discovery of EBS components, automatic log collection and analytics of all EBS log sources and troubleshooting capabilities from user experience and browser activity all the way to the logs and database infrastructure.
Implementing O&M for EBS: Insights from Sonoco
At Sonoco, we’ve traditionally managed our Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) infrastructure using a combination of monitoring tools including OEM, Trendz, Dynatrace, and custom scripts. While effective in monitoring infrastructure, middleware, and databases, these solutions lack deep visibility into EBS-specific performance and usage metrics.
Our goal was straightforward: eliminate our reliance on multiple tools (and the associated costs) by adopting an Oracle-native, out-of-the-box solution that delivers robust, EBS-aware monitoring capabilities.
Through discussions with our Oracle account team, we explored several O&M services, including:
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
- Stack Monitoring
- Ops Insights
- Database Management
- Log Analytics
After participating in multiple walkthroughs and product demonstrations, we made the decision to move forward with this integrated Oracle solution.
Oracle brought a cross-functional team to support the rollout across our OCI environment. Despite the complexity of our landscape, the implementation of all modules was completed within a few months. The timing proved to be serendipitous—just two weeks before our scheduled upgrade from EBS 12.2.9 to 12.2.13, the entire observability suite was fully operational. While the alignment wasn’t intentional, it turned out to be perfect timing.
Real-World Value After Go-Live
Soon after our EBS upgrade, we encountered performance issues that led to a noticeable spike in OCI resource consumption, especially CPU usage on our Exadata infrastructure. These inefficiencies began affecting both system performance and operating costs.
Despite being new to the O&M suite, we quickly put it to use. Within just 10 minutes, we identified three problematic SQL statements, some introduced during the upgrade, others that had deteriorated post-upgrade.
In under 30 minutes, we found three relevant Oracle patches, validated them in our non-production environment, and deployed them to production. The result: CPU usage returned to normal, and application performance improved immediately.
This outcome was a clear, measurable win and a strong testament to the power, efficiency, and user-friendliness of the O&M toolset.
Use Case Scenarios at Sonoco
O&M includes several powerful features that each play a distinct role in ensuring operational excellence. Let’s explore how each of these components contributes to optimizing performance and how Sonoco has leveraged them for real-world impact.
1. Database Insights: Unlocking Data Performance
For Sonoco, whose operations depend on real-time data from manufacturing equipment and supply chain systems, database performance is mission critical.
Database Insights feature available part of Ops Insights service enables:
- Monitoring slow-running queries and resource-heavy operations.
- Analysis of databases waits for the times to eliminate hidden bottlenecks.
- Real-time alerts and intelligent recommendations for performance tuning.
At Sonoco, Database Insights is used to optimize data retrieval from databases, ensuring real-time dashboards and reports are always up to date, minimizing production delays and decision-making gaps.
2. Exadata Insights: Maximizing Mission-Critical Performance
Sonoco’s reliance on high-throughput data platforms means that their Exadata systems must always perform at peak efficiency.
With Exadata Insights feature available part of Ops Insights service, teams can:
- Monitor hardware health, throughput, and latency.
- Identify underutilized or overloaded resources.
- Predict future capacity issues before they impact operations.
At Sonoco, Exadata Insights help IT teams stay ahead of performance degradation in manufacturing and analytics workloads, maintaining continuity across facilities.
3. Stack Monitoring: Holistic Visibility from End to End
At Sonoco, Stack Monitoring is essential for end-to-end tracking across applications, middleware, and infrastructure.
Stack Monitoring allows:
- End-to-end tracking across applications, middleware, and infrastructure.
- Correlation of issues across the stack.
- Accelerated root cause analysis with contextual insights.
4. E-Business Suite Functional Overview
The O&M Log Analytics toolset includes over 300 EBS MAU Smart Sensors, integrated into the E-Business Suite Functional Overview dashboard. These sensors continuously monitor key functional modules—such as Order Management (ONT), Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), Inventory (INV), and others—for issues within business flows or error statuses.
Sonoco Example: The E-Business Suite Functional Overview dashboard is used to quickly identify errors or disruptions within specific functional modules and transactions. It also enables drill-down capabilities to directly access relevant My Oracle Support (MOS) documents for faster issue resolution.
Oracle’s Commitment and Support
We want to acknowledge Oracle’s exceptional support throughout the implementation. Despite the complexity and numerous moving parts, the Oracle team remained actively engaged at every stage driving the project forward, resolving issues promptly, and bringing in development teams when necessary to prevent delays. Their expertise and commitment were instrumental to the success of the project.
Final Thoughts: Why O&M is a Strategic Asset for Sonoco
O&M is a robust, integrated solution that works seamlessly across the Oracle ecosystem, providing businesses with the visibility and tools they need to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their applications, databases, and infrastructure. With capabilities ranging from Database Insights and Exadata Insights to Stack Monitoring, Log Analytics, and Application Performance Monitoring, O&M delivers actionable intelligence that helps ensure high performance and exceptional user experiences.
As organizations accelerate their digital transformation and adopt cloud-native architectures, O&M has become essential for maintaining application availability, performance, and scalability. Its advanced features empower businesses to stay ahead of issues, proactively manage complex environments, and continuously optimize performance to meet the evolving demands of the digital landscape.
In a world where every millisecond counts and data drives decisions, O&M provides insights and control Sonoco needs to operate more efficiently and reliably. From database tuning to real-time user experience monitoring, it enables a shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive performance optimization.
By integrating O&M across its IT operations, Sonoco is not just managing its systems, it’s turning them into strategic assets that drive innovation, enhance customer satisfaction, and support operational excellence.
In summary, Oracle Cloud Observability and Management has already demonstrated itself as a high-impact, user-friendly solution for monitoring and managing our EBS environment. The speed and accuracy of issue identification and resolution following our recent upgrade confirmed the value of the investment. We look forward to unlocking even more of its potential in the future.
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