Other People s Tools

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Other People's Tools

Quest

Quest Software, Inc. brings its own set of products that were specifically designed for the monitoring and tuning of Oracle E-Business Suite applications. I/Watch™ for Oracle E-Business Suite allows you to examine indepth historical trends in apps processes that will help you optimize performance of queries. It provides facilities for continuous monitoring of Concurrent Managers and Concurrent Processes and analyzes poorly performing SQL statements by tracing the offending statements to their source.

I/Watch provides unattended monitoring of your system on a continuous basis while not adversely impacting the system itself. You can configure the system to alert a number of individuals if a problem should arise or an error in processing should occur. Its monitoring extends to tablespace growth, user load, and other functions within the suite that are likely targets for problems. With the assistance of I/Watch, you can easily monitor not only Concurrent Manager processes, but the application server itself, the ConText Server, all involved listeners, and objects with a high likelihood of having space related issues.

Trend analysis on key processes in the system (e.g., Concurrent Managers, workflow, and SQL statement performance) allows you to determine the best places to apply tuning efforts and allows you to easily determine if your efforts are having a detrimental or beneficial effect.

Quest furthers its offerings in the monitoring and tuning arena with the Spotlight® on Oracle E-Business Suite product. The graphic Spotlight tool displays real-time data on the actual server processes and dataflow within the system. This can allow you to quickly identify bottlenecks and attempt to correct the contentions. If you see a problem in real time and have the ability to drill down and eliminate much of the guesswork from the process, you will be able to provide longer mean time between failure and shorter mean time to recovery, not from a database recovery stand-point, but from an end user perceived problem area standpoint.

Spotlight is not simply an extension of another product into the Apps monitoring area, it was designed specifically for the Apps administrator to provide an overview of the processes and flows within the system and identify bottlenecks in the process faster (it will even alert you to an impending bottleneck if one is starting to occur) so that you can address those areas sooner. Further, through one interface, you can monitor multiple instances at one time. Spotlight interfaces with Quest's 24/7 monitoring tool, Foglight®, to allow you to gather information when no administrator is available to do the monitoring.

By combining Spotlight with Foglight, you can set monitoring of the Concurrent Managers (regardless of their work shift), all listeners (fndfs, forms, and the database listeners), Reports and Forms Servers, and the workflow engine to occur automatically and continuously. But Foglight will monitor not only your Oracle E-Business Suite environment, but also your entire database system and the network and the OS performance that all of these reside on.

BMC Software

BMC Software provides a wide range of solutions that can help you in monitoring and maintaining your Oracle E-Business Suite. The BMC solution to the monitoring and maintenance dilemma is PATROL® for Oracle E-Business Suite. PATROL is a widely known monitoring product that provides mechanisms to alert the administrator when error or user defined near error situations occur. It can save you time and effort by locating problems and identifying their root cause before they have a chance to impact your system. To accomplish this, it monitors the Forms and Web servers, the internal system, and all related underlying components. This automated monitoring in turn helps you to ensure availability and reliability of all of your application modules, the database, and underlying resources and infrastructure. PATROL is available for Versions 13.7, 11.0, and 11i of Oracle E-Business Suite (allowing you to monitor current systems clear through an upgrade) and is available for the database and OSs that support both the apps tier and the database tier. It will monitor and manage the most common Oracle E-Business Suite product modules and measure the end to end response time and performance as it occurs on the system and will report proactively on potential trouble spots.

Through one interface, you can centralize the management of all applications components, including the database instance, OSs, and middle tier services. You can proactively monitor all critical failure points in the environment (be they the database, any of the Concurrent Processes, or the Forms and Reports Servers) and identify and resolve resource conflicts with a minimum of manual intervention or system intrusion. And, using the PATROL interface, you can better plan for maintenance (reorganizing the database or rebuilding indexes), which allows you to maximize availability and minimize downtime.

The PATROL interface for monitoring and maintaining the Concurrent Managers will allow you to address wait times by identifying peak usage times and will alert the applicable people if that wait time exceeds acceptable limits. You can track overutilization and underutilization of Concurrent Managers and determine if all Concurrent Managers that are supposed to be active during a given work shift are indeed available and active on the system. PATROL allows you to startup and shutdown the Internal Manager, activate or deactivate any other Concurrent Manager that has been identified to the system, determine why any particular request errored out, and attempt to address those error conditions. The trend analysis that is available to you, as administrator, on the requests running on the system and the performance of those requests, long running and immediate, will allow you to better plan and load balance for the peak times without adversely affecting the rest of the system.

Precise

Precise Software Solutions also provides a product, Precise/Interpoint, that allows Applications administrators the ability to monitor and tune Oracle Applications by helping you to identify and track problematic SQL statements to their root origins, be they forms, reports, or ad-hoc queries created by end users. Further, Precise/Interpoint can help you to perform impact analysis on database objects that are changing and imact analysis on database version upgrades.

Precise/Interpoint is, primarily, a performance management soution that allows you to tune apps through the sql that is occurring on it. Through this interface, it allows you to break down resource intensive transactions returning to you the username program involved (be it transactional or batch), the application name under which that program was running, and the sql statement involved.

Precise allows you, instead of tuning the Oracle E-Business Suite code to which you have no supported access, to tune the underlying objects in the database by providing you with all relevant indexes for any given SQL statement and, if none exist, will suggest a new one that would have a beneficial effect on the given statement. It goes further by letting you simulate the creation, deletion, or modification of an index to determine the impact that any side effects might have on your system.

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