Enhancements to Monitoring in EM12c Release 4

Dear Readers,

What are the enhancements to the Enterprise Monitoring Framework in EM12c Release 4? This is the framework that controls the monitoring of enterprise targets.

1.

Improvement - The “Target Down” status is detected by Enterprise Manager within seconds of its occurrence. This applies to the Database, Weblogic Server, Host, Agent as well as deployed applications. This kind of ability is very important for enterprise-level monitoring.

The Host level monitoring has also been improved. There is a new “Host Down” event, and a new “Host Up (Unmonitored)” status. This covers the situation where a host can be up but the agent is not running, rather than the situation in earlier releases where it was difficult to distinguish if the host was really up or down if the target showed as down.

These kinds of enhancements improve higher target availability, compliance with SLA goals, and diagnosability in the case of the agent unreachable event. See here for the documentation.

2.

Improvement - Thresholds are now more flexible, with the introduction of Time-based Static thresholds and Adaptive thresholds.

In the case of time-based static thresholds, different thresholds can be set up for different times of the day or night, since the workload will be different during the day and night. Or, different thresholds for the weekend as opposed to weekdays as in the following example.

Adaptive Thresholds are also available; these are thresholds auto-calculated on a percentage deviation from the norm. The norm is determined by a baseline behavior built from collected historical data. This helps us to be alerted on abnormal behavior. See here for the details.

3.

Improvement - SNMP Version 3 is now supported by Enterprise Manager; this version is more secure than the previous version. Notifications on events can be sent using SNMPv3 traps.

Security enhancements in Version 3 include authentication, that the message is from a valid source, and message integrity and encryption, that ensures the packet sent has not been tampered with. This enables Data Centers to comply with security best practices when sending event information from Enterprise Manager to third party monitoring systems.

This blog post was originally posted at this link.

Regards,

Porus.