End-to-End Monitoring of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) via Oracle Management Cloud

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Before we go to end-to-end monitoring, let us talk a little about Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

APM is a way to monitor and manage an application’s performance and availability to detect, diagnose and in turn remediate issues to maintain or, exceed user expectations. Though there are many products in the market for APM, I will specifically talk about getting started with APM for Oracle E-Business Suite via Oracle Management Cloud (OMC).

Now, I do understand that Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform (OCOMP) is also available and provides functionalities similar to OMC; in my personal opinion, the product is very new, still being developed, and has a long way to go to replace or, provide unified monitoring view as OMC. OMC is still fully supported by Oracle for the near foreseeable future. Nevertheless, another blog post for a comparison between the two, but let’s focus on end-to-end monitoring of EBS via OMC here.

Pre-requisites

Oracle Management Cloud is a PAAS-based offering from Oracle and irrespective of where your EBS environment is i.e. on-premise or, cloud, it would need a way to communicate with the EBS environment. We can achieve this by installing the cloud agent with a gateway agent or, over a proxy server. We can also utilize a data collector and skip the need to install local cloud agents on the server however, there is no way we can skip the installation of an APM agent locally for application performance monitoring.

While the ways to install cloud agents and allow them to communicate with OMC may differ, the overall idea of monitoring remains the same! For end-to-end monitoring of E-business application, we would need monitoring at all three levels i.e.:

1. Operating System Monitoring via cloud agent,
2. Database monitoring via cloud agent and discovered in OMC as Database System or, individual database,
3. Application performance monitoring via APM agent.
4. Agents downloaded and transferred to the machines running EBS and its database. (Can be easily automated via Ansible).

For the sake of this article, we will target the typical installations in a Linux-based environment. I will however try to provide relevant links to address other scenarios.

Configure Host (O.S.) Monitoring

The following list contains the minimum system requirements for installing cloud agents:

1. RAM: 1 GB
2. Kernel Parameter for Ulimit value for maximum user processes >=4000
3. Ports: 4459 to 4479 (if the default port 4459 is not available, the OMC agent will try to communicate over the next available port from the defined range)
4. Free disk space: 1 GB

Step 1: Once the prerequisites are met, login to Oracle Management Cloud, and navigate to Administration –> Agent –> Download Agents.
Step 2: Download the Cloud and APM Agents. Also, copy the registration key.

Step 3: Transfer the cloud and APM agents to the VMs running the EBS application. The database server would only need the cloud agent to be installed.
Step 4: Create a new Linux user for OMC monitoring and set its password.

$ sudo useradd omcmon
$ sudo passwd omcmon

Step 5: Create the agent base directory.

mkdir -p /opt/omc

Step 6: Unzip the agent software into a temporary directory and install the agent using the following command:

./AgentInstall.sh TENANT_NAME=<TENANT_NAME> OMC_URL=<OMC_URL> AGENT_REGISTRATION_KEY=<AGENT_REGISTRATION_KEY> AGENT_BASE_DIRECTORY=<AGENT_BASE_DIRECTORY>

The various options to install a cloud agent are mentioned here. Once the cloud agent is installed, and you have enabled host monitoring, the O.S., and the agent will start showing up in OMC.

Configure Database Monitoring

Please refer to the procedure detailed in my post for “Oracle 19c monitoring” in OMC to configure database monitoring for EBS.

Configure Application Performance Monitoring

Instructions to enable Application Performance monitoring are detailed in my post “Application Performance Monitoring in Oracle EBS via OMC“.

Enable End User Monitoring

Once the APM Agent has been successfully installed, End User Monitoring can be enabled in an Oracle EBS environment by configuring browser agents with Reference injection type for APM Agents related to the oacore managed servers.