Oracle Management Cloud – IT Analytics

In this post I will give you a first glance of a demo environment of the Oracle Management Cloud offering called “IT Analytics“.

Regarding this post, be aware

My company eProseed is an Oracle Platinum partner, therefore I had the opportunity to ask for a trial on a demonstration environment, but as is, therefore this is a demo overview and not (yet) of a trial account / own test environment (but hopefully near to the real thing).

Also be aware that I had only 4 hours to play with this demo environment and although I tried to find every inch of info that was hidden under buttons, links, etc., it might be that I missed some pieces.

This demo environment is prepped by Oracle regarding, among others, an issue with a demo application called “Rideshare” (Uber look-a-like kind of possible application). This post has a lot of pictures.

So note that:

> all images are clickable, so you can zoom in to have a better look at all the details in the pictures.

🙂

As mentioned before in the general overview post about Oracle Management Cloud and here as a reference:

Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service allows you to step back and assess macro issues. It enables you to also evaluate systemic problems impacting application performance and use event analytics to fix faulty or misconfigured components.

IT Analytics

As mentioned in the IT Analytics documentation, here you can:

With IT Analytics, you can:

• Analyze data by various dimensions
• Correlate data across charts
• View the top X by a specific measure
• Forecast performance and resources, based on historical and real-time trends
• Save and share your analyses
• Build dashboards to present custom views of data, including IT asset inventory, data center performance, service level agreements, and so on

So in this service offering, Oracle takes care of some of the heavy lifting regarding giving analytics insight into:

• Resource analytics
  • IT resource utilization resource consumption,
  • Compare data,
  • Giving insight about future resource planning
• Performance analytics
  • Out-of-box analytics for most common resource bottlenecks
  • Visibility into configuration profiles of tier-specific assets based on performance
  • View the impact of shared resources
  • Insights due to being able to create correlations
• Create Dashboards
  • Allows you to build and publish custom dashboards to key stakeholders, e.g. line of business executives or heads of infrastructure or operations
• Data Explorer capability
  • Browse or perform advanced analytics on the vast array of operational data and over the long term

Overview

In the IT Analytics service offering, is more about, analytics, creating your own “worksheet”s, widgets, dashboards and the ability to have a overview of the (resource/performance/etc) information you decide you need. You can do this by out of the box dashboards that are provided by Oracle or create your own or create a dashboard or page with information based on one of the available examples. On the latter, that is where the Data Explorer comes in.

The source of the data is, I believe in this offering, pre-setup. What I mean by that is that you will not have the ability to grab content from a different place other than what Oracle presents to you, which is in this environment database and middle ware information. Do you need more, than, I believe, this is where the “Log Analytics” offering comes into play. So you could say, IT Analytics is focused on Database and Middleware only.

Via the Data Explorer you can dive into the data, filter it, and provide a way of displaying it. If you like what you have created, than you can save this set-up as a worksheet that, if needed, can be part of a dashboard.

Lets see what Oracle provides out-of-the-box, that is what is currently available in this demo environment.

Out-Of-The-Box Analytics

If you filter in the Dashboard section on “APM” and as “Creator” select “Oracle”, you would only see one dashboard. That is a completely different story if you select on “IT Analytics” and “Oracle” as the creator. The following screenshot only show a part of the available out-of-the-box “Dashboards” and “Worksheets”.

There is summery overview content like an enterprise overview dashboard with Middleware, Groups, Services, Storage, Network and Databases etc.

Or an out-of-the-box example of what you might want as a performance database analytics overview page.

Or an example out-of-the-box performance / health example of all Middleware environments that you have in your organization.

In principle, as far as I have seen, the data sources and content available to create worksheets and dashboards for, is Oracle Enterprise Manager alike and as such you have an incredible amount of content to base to analytics upon. For example there are example dashboards / worksheets that show live cycle management, resource, information.

Drill-in, zoom-in, find answers

Dashboards and worksheets can be created in such a way that you are able to drill in, zoom in, on specific pieces of presented info.

For example, when having a more detailed look at the performance database analytics dashboard, you can filter on date, performance characteristic, group all or only a single database view, etc. etc. So in short, do some analytic digging.

Have a look at the screenshots below to get a feeling what you can do, or create for yourself via IT Analytics (focusing on performance dashboards ).

Database Performance

Filter on date period

Making use or click on sections of the heat-map

Filter on one specific database, group or system

Get insight in the overall wait, IO, CPU trends

Have group the Top SQL head-map

Change size or color based on different source values

Pick one specific SQL part and get detailed info…

…regarding its SQL text content…

…its Average Active Sessions values…

…or other measures like CPU, response times, IO wait

…pin point on a specific date/time (when things went wrong, for example)…

Middleware Performance

For the Middleware out-of-the-box performance dashboard that was created by Oracle, you have a lot of the same filter, group, zoom-in etc. options.

Filter, zoom in or have a look at Garbage Collections

Filter, zoom in on JDBC Data Sources

Group, filter on specific criteria like “Host”

Use the heat map display, to zoom in directly on origin for a specific issue like Connection Failures

Data Explorer

The Data Explorer can be used to create Worksheets. These Worksheets then, when completed and saved, can be used in your own dashboards. Via a info board, you get a first glance of the steps needed to save / create a Worksheet.

There is a lot you can do via the Data Explorer regarding selecting, filter options, use of analytic functions, chart options, etc. Please refer to the documentation for more information. The following pictures give an overview of what to expect.

Via picking a data cube, you will be presented with several sources that can be used. You can search or filter the different sources on, for example, the name or its origin (e.g. database / host / etc.)

Via drag and dropping the data pallet content, for example, “I/O Time” presented in the picture below under “DB Time by CPU, I/O, Wait”, into the sections for Y-axis, X-axis, etc. You can label the different sources or via “Analytics Options”, a lot of analytical / statistical stuff like (if I remember correctly) regression, distribution, etc.

When done, you are able to choose how to present it via a lot of different chart options… The widget section will show you the end result if you press the [Run] button. This gives you a chance to see if the result is what you would like it to be.

When everything is as you would like, you can save & publish the widget, worksheet, so it can be used in your new dashboard.

Your Dashboard

When creating a dashboard, you can now add the widget via searching for it via the “Add Widget” option.

The dashboard can be split up in different sections / template layouts. Afterwards you will be able to resize regions by drag and drop actions or resize the region bigger, smaller via grabbing the edges via mouse click/resize actions.

Widgets can be drag and dropped in the sections you would like it to be in.

After saving the final Dashboard, you can now find it in the Dashboard overview page filtering on “Creator”.

The finalized dashboard, that is my attempt at a first dashboard, has a time range, but also can automatically refresh via different seconds/minutes etc. options.

Observations

Actually “IT Analytics” is the functionality I am missing so dearly in all the Oracle Enterprise Manager versions over the years.

It would have enabled me to create, for example, an IT Operations “traffic light” dashboard with a simple overview of “databases up/down/warning”, “middletier up/down/warning”, etc. in colors like red, green, yellow.

Although it doesn’t have “traffic light” charts, you could create something similar with a stacked bar chart. Although simplistic, very useful in a Operations or ServiceDesk room being presented on a big TV screen alerting everybody immediately when problems arise during working hours (and something you still could interpret from 30 feet away).

Of course you can create more reporting like of overviews or application specific dashboards with the “IT Analytics” Cloud service. In all, “IT Analytics” is a very powerful and useful addition to the (Oracle) IT tool belt.

HTH/M