Proactive alerting of issues is important, but having too many alerts can be overwhelming. The latter can cause alert fatigue, and this is usually the result of not being able to correlate related alerts (or events) into a single issue that can be managed holistically.

Event Compression Policies in Enterprise Manager address this need. It automatically correlates and compresses related events into a single, actionable incident.  The overall result of compression is a smaller set of meaningful incidents that ITOps teams can manage. This feature is available in Enterprise Manager 13.5 Release Update 8 (RU8) and later versions.

Read the complete article by Ana Maria McCollum

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has again demonstrated strong growth, introducing hundreds of services and features over the past year. With all the challenges of a global pandemic, our teams continued to deliver on our product vision, and I’m both amazed and sincerely grateful.

Gartner® analyzes major cloud infrastructure providers in three reports: The 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecards for Integrated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), the 2021 Critical Capabilities for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS), and the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CIPS. I’m happy to share the following results:

• OCI scored 78% overall in 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IaaS+PaaS, from 62% in 2020.
• Oracle’s score for required criteria grew from 74% to 90%, including scores of 100% for Compute, Storage, Networking, and Software Infrastructure, such as Database as a Service and Functions offerings.
• OCI scored better in all criteria and use cases in the 2021 Critical Capabilities for CIPS.
• Finally, we grew in both “ability to execute” and “completeness in vision” in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CIPS.

Read the complete article by Clay Magouyrk

SQL Tuning for maximizing Oracle Database performance 

Tuning usually implies fixing performance problems. However, tuning should be part of the life cycle of an application—through the analysis, design, coding, production, and maintenance stages. 

An important facet of database system performance tuning is the tuning of SQL statements. SQL tuning involves three basic steps:

•    Identifying high load or top SQL statements that are responsible for a large share of the application workload and system resources, by reviewing past SQL execution history from the system.
•    Verifying that the execution plans produced by the query optimizer for the statements perform reasonably.
•    Implementing corrective actions to generate better execution plans for poorly performing SQL statements.

Read the complete article by Sriram Vrinda

Simplifying deployments

Deploying your software can be a complex series of steps. Everyone has a horror story of a deployment gone wrong and “that time we took down production.” When an issue with a deployment arises, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. Your team gets paged and scrambles to get production working for customers. What we want as engineers is to release features to customers and have the deployment be a routine event, maybe even so routine that the deployment is boring (to borrow a phase from Camille Fournier and her essay Make Boring Plans.) In continuous deployment, we want to create a repeatable process to deploy new software and to discover any issues before the release hits production.

If you’re manually running steps in your deployment process, you juggle a complex workflow, and it’s easy to introduce errors that can lead to a failed deployment. Automating deployments with tools and processes simplifies your deployment workflow and gives you a repeatable and testable process to safely release your latest change to customers.

Read the complete article by Jonathan Schreiber

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) 13.5  is now available as an app on Oracle Cloud Marketplace.  That means customers who are interested in trying the latest version of EM 13.5 without having to provision on-premises hardware have an easy path to start working with a fully-configured, updated EM instance with minimal installation effort. 

Read the complete article by K B Sumesh

A common request from Enterprise Manager users, is the need to roll up data from multiple Enterprise Manager instances into a single view, to monitor and evaluate the status of databases across regions, applications, or configured groups. The Enterprise Manager federation capability is designed for that purpose and has been included since version 13.4 Release Update 4 (RU4). The good news is, there are no additional plug-ins or software installations needed to use it. Federation dashboards provide users a single pane of glass to monitor and drill down into details to triage and manage across all Federated EM sites by geographies or business units.

Read the article on this from Samir Bhagwat