Oracle Enterprise Manager is a central platform that facilitates the management and monitoring of enterprise applications through various management packs and application monitoring plug-ins. Among the application management packs listed as available by the vendor are those for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel; Diagnostics, Provisioning, and Configuration Management packs for Oracle Middleware; the Identity Management Pack for the Oracle Identity Management Suite; and of course several packs specifically for Oracle DB management including Diagnostics, Tuning, Change Management, and more. Heterogeneous Management Packs are additionally available offering specific services to 3rd party environments; including Diagnostics for Java Applications and 3rd party middleware, and provisioning and patching for operating systems.

Specific capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager depend on the application/system being managed and plug-in/pack availability. A few highlights from selected packs and plug-ins include:

For configuration management, the platform supports the discovery of host system configuration details and installed software components, (and for those applications where management packs are specifically available, extended topology information known to the packaged application itself), and the monitoring of configuration compliance. Policies can be deactivated enterprise-wide or for specific targets; and compliance is evaluated continuously as new targets come online.

System monitoring plug-ins provide for the examination of key application usage and health indicators, as well as any errors or warnings discovered in application components for multiple 3rd party platforms. Alerting and escalation features are supported; and thresholds can be defined in an effort to reduce false-positive notifications. Among the systems supported by monitoring plug-ins are EMC CLARiiON, Celerra, and Symmetrix, JBoss Application Server, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, IBM DB2, MS Active Directory, MS SQL Server, Linux, UNIX, Windows, and VMware ESX Server, to name a few.

Service level management capabilities allow both for the definition of service levels and time periods when they are enforced as well as the definition of availability for the applications. Service availability can be gauged by executing direct, transaction-based tests through test "beacons" or via examining the availability status of underlying system components.

Finally, automation capabilities of the platform include those facilitating bare-metal system provisioning, patch management, cloning, and snapshot features.

New features in the latest Oracle Enterprise Manager release include certification with Siebel CRM 8.1.1, a new Management Pack for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, real-time monitoring and support for Oracle Database 11g advisors, Oracle Database Vault management enhancements, enhanced or new support for Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, Oracle Coherence and Oracle Beehive, and a new management pack targeted specifically to Oracle VM environments. This latter enhancement, specifically, enables policy-based Oracle VM configuration management; automated, template-based deployments (via Oracle VM Templates); and lifecycle and HA tools.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is available now. Visit the Oracle Web site for further details.