Discovering Oracle E-Business Suite Systems

Discovering Oracle E-Business Suite Systems with Cloud Control

Before you can manage an Oracle E-Business Suite system in Cloud Control, you must discover (register) that system and its components with the agents. The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite allows you to discover and register systems that have been deployed using a standard configuration. The process of registering an Oracle E-Business Suite system with Cloud Control has been automated.
Only users with the "Add any Target" target type privilege can submit a discovery job.
For information on managing targets in Enterprise Manager, refer to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator's Guide.
Note: The management pack does not support discovery of multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances with the same name on different hosts on a given Oracle Management Server. Each Oracle E-Business Suite instance should have a unique Oracle System Identifier (SID).

Run diagnostic tests on your system before discovering it using the Prevalidate button. These tests are described below.

Prevalidating Discovery

You should prevalidate your system before the running discovery to help ensure success of the discovery process. These tests check that context files, context variables, users, and components are set up correctly in the system for successful discovery.
Use the Prevalidate button to run diagnostic tests on your system. Tests are done on the following:

• Oracle E-Business Suite context
  
• Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Oracle Management Service
  
• Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Agent

The following table lists details on the tests.

Diagnostic Tests for Discovery

Tasks	Test	Description	Notes/Expected Results/Corrective Measures
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Applications Context file: Number of Nodes	Verifies the number of applications contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Applications Context file: Context Names	Lists the names of all the application contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Applications Context file: Checking if any context file is invalid	Lists the names of all the invalid application context files in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment that would not be discovered.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Applications Context file: Checking if any context file has duplicates	Lists the names of all the duplicate application context files in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment that would lead to discovery failure.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Context variable details	View certain variables from the Context File, including: s_hostname s_appsuser s_appsgroup s_port_pool s_config_home s_atName	Lists the application context configuration variables that determine the failure/success of discovery. This information can be useful in troubleshooting discovery issues.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Database Context file: Number of Nodes	Verifies the number of database contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Database Context file: Context Names	Lists the names of all the database contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Database Context file: Checking if any context file is invalid	Lists the names of all the invalid database contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment that would not be discovered.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Validating Database Context file: Checking if any context file has duplicates	Determine if any context file has any duplicates.	Lists the names of all the duplicate database contexts in the Oracle E-Business Suite environment that would lead to discovery failure.
EBS Context Diagnostics	Context variable details	View certain variables from the context file, including: s_hostname s_dbuser s_dbgroup s_dbport	Lists the database context configuration variables that determine the failure/success of discovery. This information is useful in troubleshooting discovery issues.
OMS Diagnostics	Diagnosing Agent Installation	Validates if the EM Agent is installed on all the database and applications contexts of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment; reports accordingly with respect to every context of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment.
OMS Diagnostics	Diagnosing EBS and EM component versions	Validates the following on the OMS side: Enterprise Manager OMS Component Version Oracle E-Business Suite OMS Component version On the Agent side, validates the following on every Oracle E-Business Suite target host: EM Agent component versions Oracle E-Business Suite Agent component version	For this test to show correct results, the Host Configuration for "Oracle Software" should have been collected successfully.
Agent Diagnostics	Diagnosing Agent and EBS Operating System users	Validates the Operating System user and group information of the Agent and the Oracle E-Business Suite component.	Passing criteria: If the Operating System user is same for the Agent and the Oracle E-Business Suite component. Failure Criteria: If the Operating System user is different but the group is the same for the Agent and the Oracle E-Business Suite component. Corrective action for this would be to give appropriate permissions to the specific set of files that is displayed in the test result. If the Operating System user is different and the group is also different for Agent and the Oracle E-Business Suite component. Corrective action for this would be to look for alternatives so as to have same Operating System user or group for the Agent and Oracle E-Business Suite component. For this test to show correct results, OMS should have collected the Agent Operating System user and group information successfully.
Agent Diagnostics	Diagnosing Meta Versions of EBS target types in EM Agent and OMS	Compares versions on the OMS versus Agent for the following variables: Oracle_ebs Oracle_apps_cm Oracle_apps_cp_cst Oracle_apps_cm_cst Oracle_apps_icm Oracle_apps_inf Oracle_apps_jvm Oracle_apps_patch Oracle_apps_wf Oracle_apps_wfalsnr Oracle_apps_wfbg Oracle_apps_wfmlr Oracle_apps_jserv Oracle_apps_apache	Validates the versions of the target types owned by the management pack on OMS with every Oracle E-Business Suite environment's target host. This information helps for troubleshooting the discovery issues.
Success Check	N/A	N/A
Persist Status	N/A	N/A

The results of these diagnostics tests can be accessed from the Diagnostics Status link for the database target in the results table.
To prevalidate discovery

1. Navigate to the Discovery Wizard using Targets menu > Oracle E-Business Suite > Discovery Wizard (under "Related Links").
   
2. Select an Application Database Target and click the Prevalidate button.
   
   Note: The scope of running the Discovery Diagnostic tests is limited to only one Oracle E-Business Suite target for every transaction.
   
   
3. Enter the Monitoring Schema Username and the Monitoring Schema Password credentials for the database.
   
   
4. Click Prevalidate Discovery to start the job.
   
5. A confirmation page is shown.
   
   Click on the Diagnostics Status link for a specific Diagnostics job to drill down to details for this job.
   
6. You can then review the Enterprise Manager job execution page for the Discovery Diagnostics job.
   
   The step EBS_CONTEXT_DIAGNOSTICS runs all the tests that validate that the Oracle E-Business Suite instance is in a "healthy" condition for it to be discovered in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.
   The task EMGC_DIAGNOSTICS has two steps under it:
   
   • Step OMS_DIAGNOSTICS - This step runs all the tests that validate that the OMS component of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is in healthy condition to discover the Oracle E-Business Suite instance.
     
   • Step AGENT_DIAGNOSTICS - This step runs all the tests that validate that the Agents wherever Oracle E-Business Suite is deployed on are in healthy condition to discover the Oracle E-Business Suite instance.

Using Discovery Wizard

Discovery Wizard allows you to track, plan, log, and customize Oracle E-Business Suite discovery processes.
Discovery Wizard also provides a way to prevalidate the system to ensure that the Oracle E-Business Suite context, OMS, and Agent are set up properly. See the section Running Discovery Diagnostics for more information.
To access Discovery Wizard, navigate to the Targets menu > Oracle E-Business Suite > Discovery Wizard link (under "Related Links").

The following are prerequisites to using Discovery Wizard:

• An agent has been installed on the Oracle E-Business Suite system, on both the database tier and the application system tier.
  
• The Oracle E-Business Suite database host system has been discovered by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. In the case of a Real Application Clusters (RAC) system, agents must be installed on all the nodes in the cluster.
  
• The Oracle E-Business Suite system database has been discovered by Cloud Control.
  Note: For an AutoConfig-enabled Release 11i instance, running AutoConfig on the database tier adds the following lines to sqlnet.ora automatically:
  

  tcp.validnode_checking = yes
  tcp.invited_nodes=(11i_HOST) 

  In this case, database discovery or application discovery via Oracle Enterprise Manager will fail because the Oracle E-Business Suite instance database tier listener will reject any connection requests other than from itself. To prevent this failure, add the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control server to sqlnet_ifile.ora as listed below and bounce the database listener before discovery via Oracle Enterprise Manager.
  

  tcp.invited_nodes=(11i_HOST, EMGC_HOST) 

To use Discovery Wizard to register an Oracle E-Business Suite system
After ensuring that the above prerequisites have been met, you can begin the registration process of the Oracle E-Business Suite system using the steps below.

1. From the Discovery Wizard, you can add a database to the system using the Add Databases button.
   
   
2. Select a target from the list.
   
   
3. Once added, the database target appears in the main table of database targets.
   
4. On the main Discovery Wizard page, select the Application Database Targets you want to discover and click the Discover button to start a discovery process.
   
5. For Monitoring Schema and Monitoring Schema Password, enter the schema username and password for the Oracle E-Business Suite database that can be used by the management pack for monitoring.
   
   Note: If you had selected two or more database targets in the main Discovery Wizard page, you must enter credentials for all of them on this page, even if you do not select them all here.
   
   Note: If you have applied interoperability patches for Release 11i and/or Release 12, you can use the out-of-box em_monitor user with access to limited database objects required by the management pack. You can enable the em_monitor user as follows:
   
   • Apply required patches, if any, to your Oracle E-Business Suite system.
     Please see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 1434392.1 for information on any required patches.
     
   • Connect to the database through sqlplus as the SYSTEM user and issue command:
     

     alter user em_monitor account unlock;

   • Connect to the database through sqlplus as the em_monitor user and change the password:
     

     sqlplus em_monitor/lizard; 

   
   You can also use the E-Business Suite Database Username and E-Business Suite Database Password (formerly called the Apps Schema Username and Apps Schema Password, respectively) as your monitoring schema credentials.
   To begin the discovery process, click the Start Discovery button.
   
6. View the Discovery Job details.
   After the system starts a job to discover the Oracle E-Business Suite you can check its status on the main Discovery Wizard page.
   You can view details on the job on the Discovery Wizard main page by clicking the Status link. After gathering the inputs from the user (to register the Oracle E-Business Suite instance with Cloud Control), the discovery job connects to the Oracle E-Business Suite database and retrieves the configuration information. Cloud Control then registers the various target types for the Oracle E-Business Suite system and starts capturing the metrics.
   You can view details on the Diagnostics Job by clicking on the link for Diagnostics Status.
   
   To learn more about a particular step in the discovery job's execution, click on the linked name of the step.
   

To start the discovery process from the System Management subtab (Alternate navigation)
You can also start the registration process from the System Management subtab.

1. Click the Add button on the System Management dashboard.
   
   
2. You can then use the Add Database button to add an additional Oracle E-Business Suite database target to be discovered. In the case of an Oracle E-Business Suite instance deployed on a RAC database, select the Cluster Database Target for Discovery.

To use Discovery Wizard for a customized Oracle E-Business Suite registration process
Discovery Wizard allows you to customize the Oracle Applications registration process by enabling you to override many discovery options.

1. To configure the discovery parameters for an Oracle E-Business Suite system, click on the icon in the Configure column of the database target for the Oracle E-Business Suite to configure the parameters.
   
   
2. On the next page, enter application access details of the monitoring system. For Monitoring Schema Username and Monitoring Schema Password, enter the schema username and password for the Oracle E-Business Suite database that can be used by the management pack for monitoring. Click Continue.
   
   
3. The system then retrieves context files of the Oracle E-Business Suite system.
   
   
4. The Configure page allows you to update instance-level discovery parameters, as well as context-level parameters at the bottom of the page. To set context-level parameters, use the icon in the Configure column for the specified context.
   Configure Page for a Release 12 System
   
   Configure Page for a Release 11i System
   
   Context-level Information
   

Instance-level Parameters

The following parameters of discovery can be customized.

Instance-level Parameters for Release 12

Parameter Name	Description	Default Value
Customer Instance Group Name	All targets discovered for this instance will be grouped under this group. This group will be added to Group: Customer Group Name.	No value.
Customer Group Name	If Customer Instance Group Name is provided, then all the targets discovered for this instance and the Customer Instance Group Name will be added to this group.	No value.
Discover Workflow	Disable/Enable Monitoring of the Oracle Workflow component.	Yes
Discover Workflow Service	Disable/Enable creation of the Oracle Workflow service.	Yes
Discover Forms Service	Disable/Enable creation of the Oracle Forms service.	Yes
Discover SSA Service	Disable/Enable creation of the Self-Service Applications (SSA) Service.	Yes
Discover Patching Information Object	Disable/Enable Discovery of the Patching Information Object. This target is essential for any Oracle E-Business Suite patching application and should be enabled if any patching applications are used with this Instance.	Yes
Discover Custom Objects	Disable/Enable Discovery of customs objects configuration.	Yes
Discover Order Management Services	Disable/Enable Monitoring of Order Management services (out-of-box services).	Yes
Delete Removed Targets	All targets which are dissociated from the Applications System will be deleted from the EM Repository if this option is set to 'Yes'.	No

Instance-level Parameters for Release 11i

Parameter Name	Description	Default Value
Customer Instance Group Name	All targets discovered for this instance will be grouped under this group. This group will be added to Group: Customer Group Name.	No value
Customer Group Name	If Customer Instance Group Name is provided, then all the targets discovered for this instance and the Customer Instance Group Name will be added to this group.	No value
Discover Workflow	Disable/Enable monitoring of the Oracle Workflow component.	Yes
Discover Discoverer	Disable/Enable monitoring of the Discoverer component.	Yes
Delete Removed Targets	All targets which are dissociated from the Applications System will be deleted from the EM Repository if this option is set to 'Yes'.	No

Discovered Contexts

All contexts (nodes) that belong to the Oracle E-Business Suite are shown in this table. You can click the Configure icon for each individual context to set context-level parameters.
Once you have entered parameter values, you can do the following:

• Save - This option saves your changes to the EM Repository.
  
• Reset to Last Successful Configuration - This option resets the values to those that were used during the last successful discovery.
  
• Reset to Defaults - This option sets the parameters to the default values.
  
• Cancel - This option cancels your changes.

Configuring Contexts

Example of a Configure Context Page

Context details are retrieved from context files. There is a Database Context page applicable to both Release 11i and Release 12, and different Applications Context pages for Release 11i and Release 12.
The Mapped Alias Host configuration information can be used in host aliasing to specify the host target registered with Enterprise Manager for this context.
Database Context Page for Releases 11i and 12

Applications Context Page for Release 11i

Applications Context Page for Release 12

Parameter Name	Description	Default Value
Discover Forms	Enable/Disable discovery of the Oracle Forms target for this context.	Yes
Discover JVM Usage	Enable/Disable discovery of the JVM Usage target. This option will not affect rediscovery of the applications system.	Yes

Once you have entered parameter values, you can do one of the following:

• Save - This option saves your changes to the EM Repository.
  
• Cancel - This option cancels your changes.

For the customization to take effect you must rediscover the Oracle E-Business Suite. Rediscovery can be done by discovering the Oracle E-Business Suite instance again. Rediscovery will not affect the history of any of the already discovered targets.

Configuring the Monitoring of Oracle E-Business Suite

1. To edit the monitoring configuration of an Oracle E-Business Suite system, first select the desired system in the System Management tab, and then click Configure.
   
   
2. You can review and edit the monitoring schema information in the first step.
   
   
   • Monitoring Schema Username - This is the name of the monitoring schema in your Oracle E-Business Suite database. Enterprise Manager will connect to this schema to collect certain system metrics.
     
   • Monitoring Schema Password - This is the password of the monitoring schema in your Oracle E-Business Suite database.
   After you have reviewed the required information, click Next to continue.
   
3. 
   The availability of Oracle E-Business Suite as shown in the target home page is defined as a function of the availability of a set of predefined targets. You can change this definition in this step. The left pane shows the targets available for inclusion while the right page shows the targets that are already part of availability computation. The availability of the Oracle E-Business Suite system is calculated as described in the following table:
   

   Selected Targets’ Status	Oracle E-Business Suite System Status
   All Up	Up
   One or more Up	Partially Up
   All Down	Down

   To add a registered target to the Selected Targets list, choose the target type (for example, Database, Forms Listener for Oracle Applications Release 11i) and click Go. Select the appropriate target(s) from the Available Targets list, and click Move.
   Note: This information will not be used by Enterprise Manager Grid Control and will not be reflected in the generic pages provided by EMGC to monitor any system. The status on Oracle E-Business Suite shown in those pages is based on the status of a predefined set of targets. This set of targets cannot be changed.
   
   Once the Selected Targets List is complete, click Next to continue.
   
4. The Summary page summarizes the configuration information for your Oracle E-Business Suite system. Click Next to complete configuring the Oracle E-Business Suite system.
   

Configuring Monitoring of HTTPS/SSL Targets

To configure Cloud Control to monitor Oracle E-Business Suite middle tiers that are running in SSL, each Management Agent must be able to authenticate the middle tier's SSL certificate against its Certificate Authority (CA).

Assumed Prerequisites

The HTTP Server that ships with Oracle E-Business Suite is already configured and verified to be running in SSL mode.
Basic knowledge of SSL certificates and their configuration.

Obtaining the CA certificate(s)

1. In Microsoft Internet Explorer, connect to the HTTPS URL of the Web site you are attempting to monitor.
   
2. Double-click the lock icon at the bottom of the browser screen which indicates that you have connected to a secure Web site. The browser displays the Certificate dialog box, which describes the certificate used for this Web site. Other browsers offer a similar mechanism to view the certificate details of a Web site.
   
3. Click the Certificate Path tab and select the first entry in the list of certificates.
   
4. Click View Certificate to display a second Certificate dialog box.
   
5. Click the Details tab on the Certificate window.
   
6. Click Copy to File to display the Certificate Manager Export wizard.
   
7. In the Certificate Manager Export wizard, select Base64 encoded X.509 (.CER) as the format you want to export and save the certificate to a text file with an easily identifiable name, such as beacon_certificate.cer.
   
8. Open the certificate file using a text editor.

Add the Certificate to the Management Agent(s)

Each Management Agent that monitors an Oracle E-Business Suite middle-tier must have the CA certificate added to it as follows:

1. Locate the b64InternetCertificate.txt file in the following directory of Agent Home of the Beacon host: $AGENT_ORACLE_HOME/sysman/config (This file contains a list of Base64 Certificates).
   
2. Edit the b64InternetCertificate.txt file and add the contents of the certificate file you just exported to the end of the file, taking care to include all the Base64 text of the certificate including the BEGIN and END lines.
   
3. Repeat for each Management Agent.

Restart Each Management Agent

Each Management Agent should be restarted:

> $AGENT_ORACLE_HOME/bin/emctl stop agent
> $AGENT_ORACLE_HOME/bin/emctl start agent

Cloud Control may not immediately pick up the change. You may want to give it a few minutes for the agent to run a metrics collection and upload them to the Oracle Management Server (OMS). You can click on the Refresh icon in the upper right of the Oracle E-Business Suite home page (by the Page Refreshed time stamp) in the Cloud Control console to get updated information.

Importing an Oracle E-Business Suite SSL Certificate to the OMS

AMP invokes REST services deployed on Oracle E-Business Suite using java.net.HttpURLConnection. The User Monitoring, Diagnostics, and Setup Manager features use REST services. If the Oracle E-Business Suite instance is SSL-enabled, the SSL certificate must be exported from Oracle E-Business Suite and imported to the trust keystore of the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) that runs the OMS. Below are the steps to do this action:

1. Find out the trust keystore of WebLogic Server.
   
2. Open the WebLogic Server Administration Console by using the following steps.
   
   1. Go to the All Targets page of Enterprise Manager Grid Control
      
   2. Select the target type Oracle WebLogic Server.
      
   3. Select the WebLogic Server instance that runs the OMS.
      
   4. The target home page will contain the link to open the Administration Console.
3. From the Administration Console, select Servers.
   
4. Select the server that runs the OMS.
   
5. Click on the subtab Keystores under Configuration.
   
6. Look for the Java Standard Trust Keystore which points to the location of the keystore.
   
7. Run the command to import the certificate using the keytool utility. Use the JDK that comes with WebLogic Server.
   

   JDK_HOME/bin/keytool -importcert -alias oracle_ebs_<ebs instance name> -trustcacerts -file <location of EBS SSL certificate> -keystore <location of key store> 

   Refer to the Java SE documentation on the command keytool for information on passwords.
   
8. Restart the OMS.

For more information on configuring identity and trust for WebLogic Server, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware manual Securing Oracle WebLogic Server.

A Note on Oracle Forms 6i

Even though your Oracle Forms configuration may be running in SSL, Cloud Control does not require any additional configuration to monitor Forms. The reason for this is that it uses a different method for determining the Forms Server status which does not require SSL communications with the server.

Re-Configuring SSL for Oracle E-Business Suite

If you have implemented SSL or deactivated SSL after the initial discovery of that Oracle E-Business Suite instance in Cloud Control, you will have to re-configure Cloud Control to monitor the new URL with the new protocol. There are two ways to do this:

• The Easy Way: If you don't care about the metrics data that has been collected for the instance, you can simply remove the instance from Cloud Control and rediscover it.
  
• The Hard Way: If metrics history is important, then each HTTP Server Target has to be re-configured to point to the new URL, port, and protocol.

Re-configuring Release 11i Apache Targets

1. Select the Release 11i instance in the Oracle Applications targets tab.
   
2. Under Applications Nodes Status, expand the Context link that corresponds with your SSL middle tier.
   
3. Select the Apache target (description: "HTTP Server for Oracle Applications 11i").
   
4. From the Target menu, select Target Setup, then select Monitoring Configuration.
   
5. Edit the Protocol and Port as appropriate.
   
6. Click OK.

Re-configuring Release 12 Application Servers

1. Select the Release 12 instance in the Oracle Applications targets tab.
   
2. Under Applications Nodes Status, expand the Context link that corresponds with your SSL middle tier.
   
3. Select the target described as "Oracle Application Server".
   
4. Navigate to the Target menu (labeled "Application Server"), and select Change Application URL.
   
5. Edit the "URL to measure application response" as appropriate.
   
6. Click OK.

The Target Menu

Once you have selected an Oracle E-Business Suite target, you can use the Target menu to access additional functions that can be used with the target. In particular, you can access the following:

• Home - The Oracle E-Business Suite home page
  
• Monitoring, including Metrics features
  
• Job Activity
  
• Oracle Applications Manager
  
• Configuration Target Setup
  
• Target Information