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Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Hub

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) 13.4 RU 2 has just been released this month. You may noticed that starting from EM 13.3 PG, the Top Activity page has been decommissioned. The Performance Hub page is the one that is available and yes, is not using Flash. If you have concerns about no longer having access to your EM Flash based graphs once the Web browsers stop supporting it, then your best bet is to upgrade your EM system.

MORE HERE!

Let’s talk about the features available on the Performance Hub page.

First of all, keep in mind that this page requires the Database Diagnostics and Tuning packs. All the data used by this page is provided thanks to Oracle’s instrumentation and stored in the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). In order to open the Performance Hub page, from the Database Home page navigate to Performance -> Performance Hub -> ASH Analytics.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Menu

I’m dividing the ASH Analytics Home page into 5 main sections:

Performance Hub main timeline (red)
Tab selection between ASH Analytics and SQL Monitoring (blue)
Average Active Sessions graph (yellow)
SQL ID breakdown information (purple)
User Session breakdown information (green)

The Performance Hub main timeline shows the current database performance divided in three classes; CPU utilization, User I/O and Wait. You may try to relate this to the old Top Activity graph, this one has additional functionality though.

Using ASH analytics you can customize your performance analysis by adjusting the timeline selector. Remember that in the Top Activity page this was fixed to 5 minutes.

This becomes real handy when you try to isolate performance issues in the database. Once you select the desired timeline for you analysis, the bottom of the page will update based on you selection. Only data data falls under you selection will be displayed in sections 3,4 and 5.

On top of this, we still have the classic time related selectors and page refresh rate.

Using the tab selector you can quickly switch between ASH Analytics and SQL Monitoring.

Tab Selector

If you click on SQL Monitoring, sections 3, 4 and 5 of the ASH analytics page will be replaced with the SQL Monitoring session information table. Keep in mind that the information showed in the table will be limited by the timeline selector that we already discussed. Adjust you selection accordingly.

Let’s now move to the Average Active Sessions section. This section displays detailed information of the current active sessions in the database during the selected period of time. You have the flexibility to adjust the graph by changing the graph’s dimensions. By default the graph will use the Wait Class a the main dimension.

Apart of that you can also adjust the Maximum CPU limit line to show the limit based on the number of CPU’s, the number of CPU cores or you may decide to not show the limit at all.

Another option is to only show foreground sessions (default) or to also include background sessions. You can even choose on whether show the standard load graph or to switch into a heat map like chart and select as many dimensions as needed.

The bottom of the page will display two tables. The one on the left side will show all the SQL information and the one on the right side the session information. You should be pretty familiar with these as the old Top Activity page was showing them as well.

You can also customize the view of these two tables and adjust the dimension. By default is set to the Wait Class.

Last but not least is the ability to select a SQL ID from the table and either call SQL Tuning advisor or to create a SQL Tuning Set from the same page.

SQL Tuning Advisor / SQL Tuning Set Buttons

As you can see, this is not the old Top Activity page that we were used to, but definitively has more features and offers way more flexibility while working on monitoring or when trying to spot performance issues in the database.

Thanks,
Alfredo

OEM 13c Database Plugin 13.3.2 Caveat

I have done some testing on the OEM 13c DB Plugin 13.3.2 (PG) for the last several months. I highlighted some of the changes in this new version in a previous post:

Click Here!

During the last Dallas Oracle User Group (DOUG) conference I got couple of questions though. I will try to answer them as best as possible.

OEM 13c Top Activity page has been deprecated

I don’t know the reason why, but is a fact. Oracle is moving towards getting rid of the Top Activity page and replacing this with ASH analytics. As I keep mentioning… we are so used to Top Activity page and this will be a shocking factor for users.

We know that Internet browsers such Chrome, IE or Firefox will no longer support Adobe Flash starting next year. Oracle is now using JET instead of Flash. But the Top Activity page was solely using Flash.

There’s a trick though. Top Activity link will show at the end of the Performance Home page. So you can still access it (while your browser permits it).

ASH Analytics can’t be used for our monitoring screens

This was a really good question. There are many companies that have big screens in their command centers to monitor mission critical databases. The Top Activity page is always shown in those screens and is really handful by having a quick glance on the DB’s performance.

Top Activity page will refresh every 15 seconds but the highlighted time frame (5 minutes) always moves to the very end. This means that we only monitor the last 5 minutes every single time. We notices a different behavior with ASH analytics though.

When ASH analytics refreshes, the highlighted time frame won’t move to the very end. This means that we are only monitoring the same 5 minutes (static). See the picture below taken from my lab running 13.2 version:

I confirmed this behavior in 12c, 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3 versions of the DB Plugin. But there are good news. This didn’t happen in the latest 13.3 PG version using JET. The highlighted time frame always moves to the very end thus showing information of the last 5 minutes every time.

This is another reason to upgrade to the latest version of EM.

You can only use DB 19c as a repository if you are using the latest DB plugin

Yes. OEM 13c PG was released with full 19c support. So, the best thing to do is to upgrade to 13c PG version if you want to monitor or use 19c as your DB repository.

Hope this helps to address your questions.

Thanks,
Alfredo

Bye Bye Flash!

Formerly named Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) player was really popular in the 2000’s. I remember learning it to add animation to Web Sites I was developing during my college years. Flash has also been the target of hackers to insert viruses, hence posing several security concerns to enterprises and home users.

In the IT world, change is the only constant. So, is time to move on to the next thing.

Adobe Flash is widely used in several Oracle sites. My Oracle Support, Oracle Business Intelligence EE, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, etc.
Google just announced that it will stop supporting Flash in Google Chrome at the end of 2020.

https://blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/

That means that you will loose all those fancy graphs in your browser. Well, not quite. Oracle started to provide patches and upgrades to get rid of Adobe Flash and use JET instead.

More here…

We still have more than a year for this to happen, but is the perfect time to start planning to switch. Is this already in your plans?

Thanks,
Alfredo

Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.3.2 Database Plugin New Features (Flash and JET)

Oracle EM 13.3 PG was released April 28^th 2019. This new (plugin only) release contains 8 new plugins including a new version of the DB plugin.

After installing these plugins we noticed several changes in behavior for the DB targets.

All pages that used Adobe Flash now use Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET)
Top Activity and Emergency Performance pages were completely removed from the Performance menu

At the beginning was weird to use just ASH analytics instead of Top Activity page but all the key information is there. There’s an option to revert 3 JET pages back to Flash if needed.

This can be done through emctl commands. All this information can be found on MOS 2422790.1

Also, if you really need the old Top Activity page you can still access it using a direct URL link.

For this follow MOS 2528627.1 for more details.

Thanks,
Alfredo