I changed sessions at the last minute yesterday and ducked into Todd Sheetz's (AKA Cheesehead DBA) session on using Oracle Enterprise Manager with PeopleSoft. Todd is with Veolia Environmental Services in Wisconsin, and is also active with the IOUG. As I walked in Todd was already deep into how to get things installed and properly configured.

One key takeaway from this for people that are wanting to get started is that you need to have Grid Control already installed and configured before doing anything with the PeopleSoft plugin. Makes sense.

Todd also went through some of the security configuration and potential challenges. Due to the nature of Enterprise Manager actually, you know, managing things, it needs to have a fair amount of access (it needs access to PSHOME, Another part of the configuration is running a discovery defining
the Grid Control Management Agent, etc.). Nothing out of the ordinary, but depending how your organization is structured, you may need to coordinate this with a few different people).

One other good tip that Todd had for setup was to figure out the GUIDs for your environments up front. Todd had a pointer to David Kurtz's blog for the details on how PeopleSoft generates a globally unique identifier (GUID) for each instance. However, if you allow a GUID to be regenerated for an environment when cloning instances (which is a common practice), then the PeopleSoft plugin for Enterprise Manager does not recognize that the GUID has been changed. By generating your GUIDs upfront and keeping track of them, you can restore the proper GUID when you (for example) refresh a test database from production.

Once the plugin has been installed and is up and running on the different hosts that are running PeopleSoft, then you go online and have it discover what PeopleSoft environments that you have up and running. There was some discussion here about possible issues when you have multiple PeopleSoft environments installed on a single host, but using different accounts for them (e.g. a locked down production or production support environment along with other dev/test environments). Todd recommended running the discovery process once for each PeopleSoft environment to help alleviate this issue.

You can define a single PeopleSoft "system" to include all web servers, app servers, process schedulers, and database, but Todd mentioned that he likes to define the database separately so that when you do things like blackout the system he can manage the database blackouts separate from the appserver blackouts. We ended up having some group discussion at the podium afterwards about managing blackouts - one takeaway for me is to investigate integrating the work that we (Grey Sparling) have already done in this area for PeopleSoft with the Enterprise Manager PeopleSoft plugin.

Todd also did some live demos of their production instance of Enterprise Manager. Everything was green (which was good, else Todd might have had to demo how to fix a problem in front of everyone :-). He showed some of the different graphs and charts available, as well as how to define your own.

Labels: 2009, OpenWorld, Sysadmin