New Application Management Suites

Blog Entry by Chung Wu

Introducing Oracle Application Management Suites, the most complete and integrated solutions designed specifically for managing Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications.

Four management suites are now available. They include:

- Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite
- Application Management Suite for Siebel
- Application Management Suite for PeopleSoft
- Application Management Suite for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

Built on Oracle Enterprise Manager, these management suites enable you to manage your mission critical Oracle Applications more effectively so that you can achieve better application performance and availability, improve agility while maintaining control, and lowering the costs and risks that are associated with operating these software systems.


The management suites provides you with a different and better approach of managing your applications. Applications are different from other information technologies such as database, servers, and storage arrays in that applications are used directly by end users. Consequently, proper management of applications need to begin with a clear understanding on end user experience of the applications. Traditional component centric approach of managing application does not provide this kind of insight. A key new addition to each of the four application management suites is user experience management. Using the suites, one could gain insights on the identity of the users, when they use the apps, where they log in from, and click-by-click information on what they did and the application experience that they received, including response time measurement and records of errors and warnings. These information help you focus your resource on making improvements to the parts of the application and the underlying IT infrastructure that matter most to the users.

The management suites also provides full visibility into the internal workings of application specific artifacts beyond what typical management tools provide. Typical generic management tools monitor applications from the operating system level. However, each of this packaged Oracle applications include "containers" that are execution engines of various services. Application Management Suite's system monitoring and diagnostic capabilities enable you to look inside these containers, exposing a full set of metrics that you can set alerts on and visualize trends vs dashboards and reports. In additional, specialize tools for troubleshooting transactions, analyzing log files and diagnosing JVM problems are also built into the suites to provide you with a full range of options to address the toughest production problems. These tools help you proactively manage your application infrastructure in order to prevent problems from occurring, and when things do go wrong, troubleshoot problems quickly in order to minimize impacts to business operations.

In addition to user experience management and system monitoring and diagnostics, the suites also support configuration management. When something goes wrong with an application system, the natural thing to ask is what changed, as the changes are often the root causes of problems. Application Management Suites include configuration analysis tools that enable you to track changes to system configuration settings of the applications, compare settings across environments and create snapshot of good configurations so that they can be referenced later on. The new management suites added specific support to automate IT compliance management tasks as well, providing real time change detection and reconcilation of changes against change management authorizations so that unauthorized changes can be detected, and presenting compliance status on a set of compliance dashboards and reports, making it much easier to manage configuration related IT compliance tasks.

The fourth set of capabilities that the management suites provide is lifecycle automation. Using the suites, administrators can automate manual and error prone procedures by defining multi-step batch jobs and schedule them to run unattended, leaving the tasks of monitoring to be handled by the management suites automatically. For Oracle E-Business Suite, additional support for patching, cloning, customization deployment and functional setup migration are also included in the Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite product.

Additional information about these products is available on Oracle Technology Network. Click here for more information.

- Chung Wu.