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New Oracle Ent. Manager Adds Features for Hybrid Cloud Management, Ops Automation, Extensibility

• By John K. Waters
• May 6, 2021

Oracle has announced a major update of the Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c Release 5 , the latest version of its monitoring and management solution for Oracle database and engineered systems deployed in cloud and on-prem datacenters. The company has been working on this version for more than a year, and this release provides a unified management center for organizations that need a single set of tools for running IT operations on-premises or in the cloud.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the management product for the entire Oracle stack. It's used by thousands of customers, explained Mughees Minhas, product management VP in Oracle's Enterprise and Cloud Manageability group, to make sure their most critical business applications run without problems. In this release, there's a particular focus on helping Oracle customers with hybrid cloud challenges and the growing need for automation.

"The Cloud has enormous benefits, but from an operations perspective, it does complicate things," Minhas told ADTmag. "This is great technology that is going to save me a lot of money, but operationally, I have to deal with all this complexity of multiple clouds and on-premises systems, all with their own tooling ecosystems. How do I manage this sprawl of assets and operational and data silos? This release is very important from that perspective."

This release focuses on three elements, Minhas said: hybrid cloud management, ops automation, and extensibility.

The advanced features in this release around hyper-scale observability and management, he explained, come in the form of a single Oracle Enterprise Manager deployment that can scale up to monitor and manage millions of targets. Along with hyper scalability, this release provides smart features and approaches to manage at scale, including Dynamic Groups, Monitoring Templates, Event Compression, and more.

"You cannot practically manage large environments without utilizing such features," Minhas said.

This release also provides in-depth management of the entire Oracle stack. "We call this application-to-SSD monitoring and management, which covers packaged applications like E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel. Also, custom-built apps, middle tier, application server, database, operating system, and virtual infrastructure." There's also comprehensive support for Oracle Engineered Systems, such as Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (ZDLRA), and Private Cloud Appliance (PCA). The release supports integrated hardware and software monitoring and management of these systems and lifecycle management of the databases running on Exadata, PCA, and ODA.

Minhas also pointed to Oracle Enterprise Manager's leadership position in the data management space. Writing in a blog post about the release, he said, "[Oracle Enterprise Manager] has been a companion for the Oracle Database, middle-tier and applications for over 20 years. As Oracle Database has evolved and improved over that time, [it] has kept pace, with features that enable DBAs to take advantage of those advancements and help manage growing environments in a scalable fashion."

Although this release was announced last week, the features will actually be rolled out on a monthly basis, Minhas said.

"We can't do big announcements every month," he said, "so we let our customers know a year ahead what they can expect now, six months from now, and down the road. It allows our customers to get ready for the upgrades and their favorite features."