Managing Oracle EBS: A Day in the Trenches

Oracle E-Business Suite is a highly valuable tool in your arsenal, but the software can also be described as volatile and finicky. Trying to get Oracle EBS to work properly and give you some peace of mind can sometimes feel like trying to corral a herd of screaming toddlers.

 
Managers and directors know firsthand just how much of a challenge it can be just to keep Oracle EBS up and running. With issues like service component status, log file errors, deploying new patches, and more to consider, it might seem like a minor miracle that your Oracle EBS deployment is still going at all.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the management platform that provides an all-in-one software interface for overseeing all your Oracle deployments. The task of Oracle professionals is to balance the needs of business users and customers with the underlying technical requirements and constraints of the Oracle software.

At the top of the funnel, company managers and directors may be purely results-driven, wondering “Why aren’t these orders being completed like I expected?” Beneath them, roles such as application managers, DBAs, and system administrators need to check the software, database, applications, and network (respectively) in order to hunt down the underlying performance issues.

Unfortunately, this process (called root cause analysis) isn’t always as easy as it seems. Without a strong, dedicated solution for monitoring and alerting, businesses struggle to quickly identify and resolve issues when they arise. Often, the IT team must resort to trial and error–or, if the problem seems to have gone away, resolving to fix it the next time that it crops up.

The best step for businesses to take when confronted with these challenges is to establish a well-defined plan for proactive daily health checks. By performing regular maintenance and monitoring on your Oracle environment, you’ll be much less likely to run into serious issues that threaten the availability, scalability, and security of your applications. In particular, you should automate as much of your Oracle EBS maintenance workflow as possible to make these health checks less demanding on your DBAs.

Need help on where to begin with these health checks? Download our Oracle EBS Punch List, our essential top 18 daily proactive checks our own expert Oracle EBS DBAs use to keep our client’s systems online.