Application Performance Monitoring on OCI

At the beginning of March, Oracle released the OCI “edition” of an Application Performance Monitoring Service (APM) (https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/releasenotes/changes/1ad905fa-2ac3-4415-a43a-77bbcb47c0a1/). The service is even available free of charge for smaller applications (up to 1,000 Events per hour): https://www.oracle.com/manageability/application-performance-monitoring/

In the context of an Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade project and testing associated with this upgrade, I decided to take a closer look at the service.

Installation in an E-Business Suite Context

There is a potential risk for confusion between the installation guide of the new service (https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/application-performance-monitoring/doc/deploy-apm-java-agent.html#GUID-081D2588-8A46-46CA-9297-3654002702D0) and the old service, that has dedicated guidance on how to install in an E-Business Environment (https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/management-cloud/dmapm/install-and-configure-apm-java-agent-oracle-e-business-suite.html#GUID-E35EF7CB-AB3F-45DF-8918-E950177224C6).

Combining the two guides gives a good guidance on how to enable the new APM Java Agent for an E-Business Suite 12.2.10 environment:

1. Create a new (free) APM Domain in the OCI Console (https://cloud.oracle.com/apm/apm-admin?region=eu-frankfurt-1):
   
2. Download the APM Agent in the “Resources” section to the E-Business Suite (primary) Application Server.
3. Install the APM Agent (you can get the private data key as well as the endpoint from the Administration Section in the OCI Console):
   java -jar apm-java-agent-installer-1.0.1389.jar provision-agent -service-name=upg2app -destination=/u01/install/APPS/fs_ne -private-data-key=XXXXXYYYY -data-upload-endpoint=https://xxxx.apm-agt.eu-frankfurt-1.oci.oraclecloud.com
4. Open the Weblogic Administration Console of the E-Business Suite environment and add -javaagent:/u01/install/APPS/fs_ne/oracle-apm-agent/bootstrap/ApmAgent.jar to each Managed Server that you want to monitor:
5. Bounce the E-Business Suite Environment

Exploring APM Console

At startup, the APM Agent of each managed server is registered and displayed in the OCI Console for Application Performance Monitoring:

Apart from this overview dashboard, there is also a “Trace Explorer” that shows all the requests executed. You can easily drill down into individual HTTP sessions/requests and see in detail what has happened all the way down to the database:

More to come

The tooling furthermore provides the ability to embed a client side agent into the HTML pages run by the end user and thus allows end-to-end-monitoring of user sessions. https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/application-performance-monitoring/doc/deploy-browser-agent-your-application.html describes how to modify the web application; The procedure described in this (new) document can be combined with the E-Business Suite specific procedures described there: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/management-cloud/dmapm/install-and-configure-apm-java-agent-oracle-e-business-suite.html#GUID-70143736-9205-477C-9B7B-463D7DFD08D2

The roadmap suggests that this will no longer be required in a future version of APM and that the user will be able to enable End-to-End-Monitoring by simply enabling it for the Agent.

Summary

The tool (to a limited extent even free) allows comprehensive End-To-End Monitoring of an Oracle E-Business Suite environment. The End-To-End User-Tracking easily allows correlating performance glitches reported by users with the details encountered on both the application server and the database.