What is Oracle Grid Control?

OEM Grid Control 11g enables centralized administration and monitoring of “the grid.” Out of the box, Grid Control provides end-to-end monitoring and administration of the Oracle Database (including 11g Release 2 new features), Oracle Clusterware, Linux OS, Oracle Middleware components including Oracle WebLogic Server, and much more. When combined with the numerous available management packs and system monitoring plug-ins, the Grid Control platform can be extended to cover integration management from application to disk.

The Oracle Grid Control platform is fully extensible through Oracle-supplied, Oracle partner–supplied, or custom-built management plug-ins. Grid Control can also integrate with third-party management systems, allowing you to take advantage of the strengths of monitoring and administering the Oracle Grid with Oracle while allowing the third-party management system to monitor and administer the components of the grid that fit within its strengths. An example of this integration is HP Operations Center via the OpenView Operations (OVO) management connector.

In addition to simple database administration, other key features of Grid Control 11g include the following:

• Centralized system monitoring Finally, you can stop maintaining all of those legacy database and system monitoring scripts. Grid Control allows for notification of hundreds of predefined metrics for configured targets (targets in Grid Control are database instances, ASM instances, servers, application servers, and so on). Should you not find a metric you need to monitor for a target, you can create a user-defined metric. Properly configured notifications will allow for notification and/or corrective action to be taken prior to any application impact.
• Group management Thinking along the lines of the grid, Production would be a group that encompasses all the production web server, app server, and database server targets. This group can then be viewed as a single logical entity within Grid Control and could include the members of the administration staff in charge of the production systems; a similar scenario would follow for development and QA.
• Job System You can replace those 50-plus cron jobs defined on all those systems with the Grid Control Job System. Jobs such as database backups, OS backups, and log file rotations are available at your disposal. The Job System also is extremely flexible in the fact that user-defined OS and/or SQL commands can be run. The execution history of each job is stored in the Management Repository for later reporting or viewing.
• Information Publisher Numerous canned reports are available with Grid Control. Should these reports not meet your needs, you can write custom reports on the data available within the Management Repository.
• Integration with My Oracle Support Direct access to My Oracle Support is offered through the Grid Control UI.

This unified solution keeps the grid at your fingertips, making your life as the modern-day DBA much easier.