Oracle Enterprise Manager for hybrid cloud monitoring

Cloud computing comes in many forms, in some cases cloud computing is “just” another form of hosting and it is considered an IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service). In this cloud computing model some of your servers / systems will be located within the cloud of a cloud vendor. Amazon is a good example of this. By having your servers in one or more cloud and some (or none) located in your traditional datacenter you start creating a hybrid cloud model.

Having a hybrid cloud model provides you the options to make sue of the best of breed hosting options. This can be a big advantage however in some cases also brings a challenge. Even though everything can be hosted somewhere in a cloud you most likely would like to have a unified monitoring in place which gives you a holistic view of all your servers and services.

Monitoring capabilities, which provide you a holistic overview of your Enterprise IT assets are provided for Oracle products and none Oracle products by Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides you with options to monitor hardware and software within your Oracle landscape and also maintain it from the same console.

Oracle is providing a great, out of the box, solution when monitoring your on premise IT assets and it can even monitor in multiple datacenters when you have a dual or triple datacenter setup. However, in some cases you have servers running within the Amazon Web Service (AWS) hosting cloud. This is a trend that is seen more and more within the corporate world. Even though some of your servers are running at AWS you still want to include them in your default monitoring tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager and be able to monitor the complete hybrid cloud setup.



In the above example you can see how we leverage an already available tunnel between the enterprise datacenter and AWS to ensure that the OEM connection is secured and encrypted on a network layer. Connecting the datacenter and AWD in such a manner is common practice and when connecting Oracle Enterprise Manager to the servers in AWS you can leverage this tunnel to do so.

Oracle is providing a plugin for this in the Oracle Enterprise Manager extensibility exchange. This plugin is developed by Oracle to monitor the AWS services and by doing so provide you a single monitoring console.

• Support for monitoring the following Amazon Web Services:
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

• Rich and exhaustive list of metrics.  Metrics are collected remotely using the Amazon Web Services Cloudwatch API.

• Detailed configuration information.

• Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration information.

• Raise alerts based on thresholds set on monitoring data.

The plugin is available for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2.0 and later. More information can be found at the Oracle Enterprise Manager exchange website, the documentation can be found here.