Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c (EM) Lifecycle Management pack offers a set of tools to help you manage all your data canter targets from a single pane of glass. All these tools are listed on my previous post.
One of this tools is Configuration and Drift Management. What is it and how it works? Well, pretty simple. EM 13c collects configuration data from all the configured managed targets and stores it in the Management Repository database. You can use this configuration data to track, search and compare configuration changes for below targets:
- Hosts
- Database
- Middleware
- Elastic Cloud Infrastructure
- VM Server Pool
- Client
- Non-Oracle Systems
The Configuration tool is located under Enterprise -> Configuration. Let’s take a look at the Search section.
This will take you to the Configuration Search Library. Take a look at the pre-defined searches available for all the target types already mentioned. You can run these searches against your managed targets, but also you can create new custom searches based on your requirements.
Let’s select the first Configuration search from the table and click Run.
The Initialization Parameter Settings search will show all the results of Configuration data collected for all the targets with target type as “Database Instance”.
You can export or print this search results. One important feature to mention is that you can customize this search on the fly. Look at the upper right corner for a button called “Search Using SQL”. This basically allows you to use SQL to customize this search. Let’s click on it.
In the Query section you can customize your search as needed. In this example, I’m removing the “emrepo” target from the search. You can save this customized search if needed.
Another way to access Configuration data is to go to the target’s home page and navigate to Configuration -> Latest. This provides you with just this target’s Configuration data and not for all the managed targets.
This page shows all the Configuration data collected for the target based on the pre-defined search. Any changes made to the search will have an impact on these results.
Configuration Properties tab shows all the configuration items along with the values at the time they were collected. See “Last collected at” for more information. You can navigate to “Immediate Relationship” tab to have insights about the relationship of this target with other managed targets. In this example you can see the DB system, listeners, agent and host related to this target.
The rest of the tabs provide information about membership and usage of the target. Now let’s take a look at the “Actions” button. You can save, export, see history and compare this data against another target of the same type.
Let’s click on “Compare” to make a one-time comparison.
I’m going to select another example database from the list. Keep in mind that this database has DataGuard configured, so I’m expecting to see a lot of differences as result.
Here you go! 89 differences between my 2 example databases. Again, some of the parameters are expected to differ but what about:
- the interconnect parameter for instances running on the same host?
- SGA and PGA size parameters for instances of the same cluster database?
- the compatible parameter for instances of the same cluster database?
This is just an small example on how this tool works and how powerful it can be in order to drive consistency in the configuration of all your managed targets.
But wait a minute… Can you automate these comparisons and send me a report? The answer is yes, that will be part of my next post.
Stay tuned!
Alfredo