8 Extending Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager is the Oracle central management solution for managing, monitoring, and tuning the complete Oracle environment. Most enterprise environments include, in addition to the Oracle environment, custom software and hardware modules that require the same level of management provided by Enterprise Manager.

By extending Enterprise Manager, you can leverage the same valuable management infrastructure such as alert monitoring, real-time diagnostics, and service level reporting provided by Enterprise Manager. You can increase the flexibility of the framework to better monitor and manage your enterprise applications. From software applications to specific infrastructure elements that support enterprise systems, you can consolidate the monitoring and management of your complete application environment using a single consistent interface.

The following sections explain extension areas for typical framework integration activities:

Enhancing Enterprise Manager
Accessing Management Information Using Management Repository Views
Using Fetchlets
Using User-Defined SQL Metrics

Enhancing Enterprise Manager

The Enterprise Manager framework is extensible (that is, can be extended) at many levels. This extensibility provides you with complete flexibility in tailoring Enterprise Manager to meet your management needs. Enterprise Manager provides the following extension capabilities and attributes:

Easy to add new managed target types

When you add a custom target, all the rich features of Enterprise Manager are automatically extended to that target type. You do not need to make any code changes at the repository or Grid Control level. The target becomes an important element of Enterprise Manager and you can take advantage of:
- Historical collections
- Real-time notifications
- Metric baselines
- Blackouts
- Notification rules
Accessible system data

Management information collected in the Oracle Management Repository is easily accessible through predefined Management Repository views.
Easy third-party integration

The Enterprise Manager framework is extensible and flexible enough to allow integration with cooperative management vendors, trouble ticket generation systems, or other proprietary systems that are part of your management process.

Accessing Management Information Using Management Repository Views

The Management Repository views provide access to target, metric, and monitoring information stored in the Management Repository. Accessing the Management Repository allows you to:

Obtain pertinent application-specific information at the correct level of granularity and density for a wider variety of users, for example, IT staff, executives, and developers.
Perform historical analysis or additional computation on stored data.
Streamline your operations by sending Enterprise Manager Notifications to trouble-ticketing systems such as Oracle iSupport and Remedy.

Management Repository as Comprehensive Source

The Management Repository is the comprehensive source for all the management information in the managed environment. The key to extensibility is the Management Repository's open schema. This open architecture allows you to customize how the information in the Management Repository is used if the Enterprise Manager standard configuration does not meet your requirements.

To facilitate easy access to information stored in the Management Repository, Enterprise Manager supplies a comprehensive set of views. Views protect custom applications from any underlying changes to the Management Repository schema and ensures upstream applications will not break when the Management Repository schema changes as a result of patching or upgrades to the underlying Management Repository tables.

Base Views

The views have been designed to present the management information that is stored in the physical database tables in a form that is both intuitive and directly usable for client interfaces, reports, and other consumers of management information. The three primary view categories provide access to the majority of the management information in the Management Repository:

Central Policy Views

These views provide information on central policies, such as blackout schedules and histories, or metric collection, that have been set for managed targets.
Monitoring Views

The monitoring views provide information about the metric data in the Management Repository that has been collected for each of the managed targets.
Inventory Views

The inventory views provide information about entities within the management environment and their attributes.

In addition to base views, Enterprise Manager provides views for:

Application Performance Management
Enterprise Configuration Management
Database Configuration

See Also:
For detailed information about views, see Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager

Imbedded Queries In Code

Because the views are simple queries to a database, you can imbed these queries within any application code used to return information for further processing and display in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control or third-party user interfaces.

Using Fetchlets

Data retrieval is handled through predefined fetchlets. A fetchlet is a parameterized data access mechanism that takes arguments (such as a script, a SQL statement, a target instance's properties) as input and returns formatted data. Each fetchlet handles a specific type of data access.

The fetchlets supplied with Enterprise Manager provide data retrieval capability for the most common data access methods, such as SQL, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), HTTP, and Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS). To handle more complex data access requirements, Enterprise Manager also provides an OS command fetchlet, allowing developers to implement custom metric collection methods.

The fetchlets and data access methods are comprehensive, that is, you need not write or extend a fetchlet. You need only decide which fetchlet or method meets your needs.

The following list is an example of the fetchlets supplied with Enterprise Manager:

OS command fetchlets
SQL fetchlet
User-defined metrics fetchlet
URL timing fetchlet
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) fetchlet
Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) fetchlet

Allows you to collect management content from a Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM).

Using User-Defined SQL Metrics

User-defined SQL metrics are very similar to user-defined metrics (see Creating User-Defined Metrics). The difference is that user-defined SQL metrics are written specifically for conditions related to databases.

See Also:

Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager manual