Review of new Middleware Management with Grid Control book

I was recently requested to review a new book "Middleware Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g R5" by Debu Panda and Arvind Maheshwari . I received a review e-copy of the book and was pleasantly surprised when I went through the book, it is a very good introduction for all the people who are working with Oracle Fusion Middleware and want to use Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage most of the stack.

After a brief explanation of installing Grid Control, including monitoring basics, the book delves into monitoring and managing Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Forms and Reports Services and Applications. It then also looks at the monitoring of BPEL process manager and BPEL processes, the monitoring of the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) and OSB services, managing the Identity Manager Suite, the Coherence Cluster, and also non-Oracle middleware like Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, IBM Websphere, and Microsoft middleware.

The book also has a chapter on the new Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) product and Composite Application Monitor and Modeler, and how to use these products to diagnose Java applications, and monitor and diagnose composite applications respectively.

As a surprise bonus, the book has a very interesting chapter on Building your own Monitoring Plug-in. The Sun Java Web server is used as an example, and the steps to build a simple monitoring plug-in for this web server are outlined. This is followed by another good chapter on Best Practices for Managing Middleware Components using Enterprise Manager.

All in all, a very useful book for Middleware administrators who are using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, or for those who want to know how Enterprise Manager is handling the monitoring and management of such products. Well done and a good practical guide.

1.1.0 version of EM widgets

Rejeeb Mohammed, User Experience Designer, EM User Experience Team writes:

We've released the 1.1.0 version of EM widgets.This build has few new features (including the much-requested option to customize database targets in the High-Load Databases widget) and a number of bug fixes.To upgrade to the newer version either use the auto update feature given in the widgets or reinstall the widget from OTN:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/widgets/index.html

Thanks,
Rejeeb
User Experience Designer
EM User Experience Team

Most Popular OTN articles in 2009 - two of my articles on Enterprise Manager

Fellow Readers,

Great News. The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) has just published
the list of Most Popular OTN articles in 2009 and two of my articles
on Enterprise Manager are in the list.

http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2009/11/the_most_popular_articles_and.html

The OTN is the world's largest community of Developers, DBAs and Architects.
The two articles of mine in the top 10 are:

Oracle RMAN Backups: Pushing the "Easy" Button
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture for Very Large Sites

Thanks for the tremendous support of the readers on this topic. My aim is to make Grid Control popular among the DBA and IT community, it really is a fantastic product that makes our lives easier.

Regards,

Porus.