Oracle Enterprises Manager Topology Adobe SVG

Oracle Enterprise manager provides you the option to see the topolgy of a service. When you open this page you can however encounter a page which states the following;

“You are seeing this page because you do not have the Adobe SVG Plugin installed. To view the visual topology, please download the Adobe SVG Plugin 3.0.x”

This is the case when you open for example the topology page from a service as shown in the screenshot below:

Strange thing is that Adobe has stated they will discontinue SVG viewer as from January 2009. You can however still download the installer from the adobe site. You can also go to the plugin website from Microsoft to download a SVG plugin.

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is a text-based graphics language that describes images with vector shapes, text, and embedded raster graphics.

SVG files are compact and provide high-quality graphics on the Web, in print, and on resource-limited handeld devices. In addition, SVG supports scripting and animation, so is ideal for interactive, data-driven, personalized graphics.

SVG is a royalty-free vendor-neutral open standard developed under the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Process.

After installing this plugin you will be able to view the topology pages in Oracle Enterprise Manager without any issue.

Oracle Enterprise Manager edit target properties

Oracle Enterprise Manager is designed to help you monitor and maintain servers and systems in large scale enterprise environments and not so much to be used within a small company with only a couple of database servers. You can use it however if you look at the way the products is build you see that the intention is to deploy and use in large scale.  When you are talking about maintaining large number of systems for multiple departments or even for multiple customers if you host and maintain systems for a large number of customers. 

When you use it in such an environment you would like to store more information about the system than you get from a discovery. If you go to “target setup” and select Properties you can add more information to the target.  

For example who to contact, which department and very important, what kind of server / service is this? Development, Production, Test,...

Oracle Enterprise Manager change dashboard

Oracle Enterprise Manager is a great solution to get a 360 view on your complete IT landscape and to enable the IT staff from you company to act fast and become more efficient. Even though you have a enormous set of options within Oracle Enterprise Manager and with the move to cloud management they make a very good case for the tool there are still some points. First and foremost is that the price is on the high side. If you already have invested for years in optimizing your IT the costs for the final optimization in the form of Oracle Enterprise Manager can come as a shock as the benefits will not be that extreme. Second thing is that you can see possibly to much.

For a tool that provide you a complete view on your hardware, operating systems, databases and applications from one single tool that might sound a little strange however it is true. Without a good and well thought setup plan your administrators will be to overwhelmed to be efficient. It is of vital importance that you think about who can see what and who can do what. In essence everyone within your own organization should be able to see everything however their main dashboards should be tuned to show them the most important and critical information when they open Oracle Enterprise Manager. For example a UNIX administrator will not have to see all the database information on his first screen, what this person needs is the information of all the servers running. By default you get a somewhat overwhelming screen as shown below;

You can change this by navigating to “setup” > “My Preferences” > “Select my Home”. By default you have 7 options in this screen where you can pick the most appropriate for your daily job. You have the following options:


Summary: Summary page provides a complete and consolidated view of targets monitored by Enterprise Manager.

Databases: Monitor any database instance or RAC database right on the homepage. Check the load, memory consumption and any issues related to the target.

Incidents: Incident console helps users track, diagnose and resolve issues identified across targets by Enterprise Manager.

SOA: An enterprise level view for all the SOA targets with the Alerts, Policy Violations, and critical metrics. It provides details of SOA Composites, BPEL 10g Process, OSB Services and Web Services.

Middleware: Monitor all middleware targets in your environment from this page.

Composite Application: An enterprise level view of Composite Applications. It provides list of all Composite Applications created with their member details along with status information.

Service Request: The Service Request page provides access to the Service Request creation and management features in My Oracle Support, Oracle's customer support portal.

Selecting one of those will change the default first page to a more appropriate page for your day to day job.