The latest release of Oracle Application Server, Oracle Application Server 10g, was designed to ease the overall management burden by automating many management tasks for large-scale grid computing deployment. These include:
Software provisioning, including installation, configuration, cloning, patching, and upgrades
User provisioning, including security and identity management
Application management and monitoring
Workload management, including dynamic resource allocation and failover notification
Systems management and monitoring
Oracle provides Oracle Enterprise Manager, a management tool and framework, as part of every application server and Oracle database. Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager include not only generic monitoring of Oracle Application Server (e.g., CPU and memory usage), but also extended support of specific BI components deployed as part of Oracle Application Server. For example, configuration of OracleAS Discoverer and OracleAS Reports Services is performed via Oracle Enterprise Manager. OracleAS Reports Services performance can also be monitored, and job queues can be viewed and managed through Oracle Enterprise Manager.
The web-based Application Server Control tool, accessible through Oracle Enterprise Manager, allows you to view the Log Repository error logs. These logs can be populated with warnings and errors generated by OracleAS Discoverer and OracleAS Reports Server for debugging purposes. The Log Loader, started through Application Server Control, initiates and populates this Log Repository.
There are myriad ways to use Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage OracleAS Discoverer; here are some examples:
Starting and stopping the OracleAS Discoverer Service
Enabling and disabling client-tier components
Selecting the locale for public connections
Enabling or disabling graphs in Discoverer Viewer and Discoverer Portlet Provider
Managing connections for Discoverer Plus and Discoverer Viewer
Specifying the number of stylesheets to pool for Discoverer Viewer and Discoverer Portlet Provider
Specifying a delay value for the query progress page in Discoverer Viewer
Specifying the communications protocol for the middle tier for Discoverer Plus
Specifying the maximum number of Discoverer Portlet Provider sessions to pool
Starting and stopping Discoverer Servlets
Searching for and analyzing the log files
See Chapter 3 for more information about Oracle Enterprise Manager.