Skip to main content

3 Keys to Maximizing Oracle Application Performance

Sridhar Iyengar

Judging by the activity at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 — and in businesses around the world — Oracle is quickly emerging as a leading provider of enterprise application infrastructure. From the Oracle E-Business Suite to the Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle relational database, the company’s software empowers companies to find new and different ways to leverage their data to gain competitive advantage.

In the IT department, meanwhile, the rise of the Oracle-powered business is putting the pressure on IT admins and managers charged with supporting an exploding number of business-critical applications. If you're responsible for the Oracle infrastructure, you've got to ensure that it performs optimally and meets service level standards. When any one of the Oracle components fails or underperforms, your business is immediately and adversely affected.

So, what does it take to optimize an Oracle installation? The trick is to clearly understand the complex interrelationships among the databases and applications. That way, you can quickly reach and troubleshoot the root problem of an underperforming Oracle system. When you know exactly what's running — and how it's running — at the application, database and network level, you can keep Oracle humming. Here are three keys to maximizing your Oracle application performance.

1. Monitor Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite is being adopted by large businesses to handle their ERP, CRM and supply chain management needs. To ensure peak performance and availability of this application suite, IT teams should monitor several key performance indicators, including:

- Number of connections

- Active connections

- Active requests

- Completed requests

- Average, minimum and maximum response times

- Process heap size

Of course, you should also configure alarms for the parameters above. Based on the thresholds you configure, you'll receive notifications and alarms when baseline performance standards are not met. These real-time responses provide the information you need to take immediate corrective actions.

You can also use performance graphs and reports to reveal real-time and historical views of Oracle E-Business Suite availability, health and connection time.

2. Measure Oracle Database Performance

Oracle Database is an enterprise-grade RDBMS used to host data for business-critical applications. If you want to manage the availability, performance and capacity of Oracle Database, you've got to monitor:

- Database backup status

- Oracle ASM (automatic storage management) instances

- Block corruption

- PGA (program global area) details

- Processes scheduled jobs

- Objects approaching max extents

You should also monitor performance statistics such as user activity, status, table space, SGA performance and session details — and set alarms and notifications based on those parameters. And if you monitor SQL queries, you'll be able to expose business metrics to line of business managers.

Tracking these key performance attributes in real time and/or via historical reports helps you visualize the health, availability and usage of an Oracle database server farm. When you group your databases according to the business process supported, you can help your operations team prioritize alarms as they are received.

3. Monitor Oracle Application Server and Middleware

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is one of the leading application servers in the marketplace, for both conventional and cloud environments. To diagnose and correct performance and availability problems with Oracle WebLogic application servers, you need to monitor performance statistics, such as:

- Database connection pools

- Servlets

- JVM memory usage

- User sessions

You will also want to analyze web transactions from end to end — that is, from URL to SQL queries of the web application — to see the time taken in the various tiers such as web, Java, EJB and JDBC. That analysis will make it a lot easier to troubleshoot problem areas. All you have to do is obtain the slow URLs and take a look at the trace all the way to the SQL query.

As Oracle expands its enterprise influence, you're bound to run into the company's application infrastructure sooner or later. When you do, adopt the three keys above and you'll be able to monitor the entire Oracle applications stack and gain the performance insight needed to keep your Oracle-driven business solutions running at peak efficiency and maximum performance.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

3 Keys to Maximizing Oracle Application Performance

Sridhar Iyengar

Judging by the activity at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 — and in businesses around the world — Oracle is quickly emerging as a leading provider of enterprise application infrastructure. From the Oracle E-Business Suite to the Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle relational database, the company’s software empowers companies to find new and different ways to leverage their data to gain competitive advantage.

In the IT department, meanwhile, the rise of the Oracle-powered business is putting the pressure on IT admins and managers charged with supporting an exploding number of business-critical applications. If you're responsible for the Oracle infrastructure, you've got to ensure that it performs optimally and meets service level standards. When any one of the Oracle components fails or underperforms, your business is immediately and adversely affected.

So, what does it take to optimize an Oracle installation? The trick is to clearly understand the complex interrelationships among the databases and applications. That way, you can quickly reach and troubleshoot the root problem of an underperforming Oracle system. When you know exactly what's running — and how it's running — at the application, database and network level, you can keep Oracle humming. Here are three keys to maximizing your Oracle application performance.

1. Monitor Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite is being adopted by large businesses to handle their ERP, CRM and supply chain management needs. To ensure peak performance and availability of this application suite, IT teams should monitor several key performance indicators, including:

- Number of connections

- Active connections

- Active requests

- Completed requests

- Average, minimum and maximum response times

- Process heap size

Of course, you should also configure alarms for the parameters above. Based on the thresholds you configure, you'll receive notifications and alarms when baseline performance standards are not met. These real-time responses provide the information you need to take immediate corrective actions.

You can also use performance graphs and reports to reveal real-time and historical views of Oracle E-Business Suite availability, health and connection time.

2. Measure Oracle Database Performance

Oracle Database is an enterprise-grade RDBMS used to host data for business-critical applications. If you want to manage the availability, performance and capacity of Oracle Database, you've got to monitor:

- Database backup status

- Oracle ASM (automatic storage management) instances

- Block corruption

- PGA (program global area) details

- Processes scheduled jobs

- Objects approaching max extents

You should also monitor performance statistics such as user activity, status, table space, SGA performance and session details — and set alarms and notifications based on those parameters. And if you monitor SQL queries, you'll be able to expose business metrics to line of business managers.

Tracking these key performance attributes in real time and/or via historical reports helps you visualize the health, availability and usage of an Oracle database server farm. When you group your databases according to the business process supported, you can help your operations team prioritize alarms as they are received.

3. Monitor Oracle Application Server and Middleware

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is one of the leading application servers in the marketplace, for both conventional and cloud environments. To diagnose and correct performance and availability problems with Oracle WebLogic application servers, you need to monitor performance statistics, such as:

- Database connection pools

- Servlets

- JVM memory usage

- User sessions

You will also want to analyze web transactions from end to end — that is, from URL to SQL queries of the web application — to see the time taken in the various tiers such as web, Java, EJB and JDBC. That analysis will make it a lot easier to troubleshoot problem areas. All you have to do is obtain the slow URLs and take a look at the trace all the way to the SQL query.

As Oracle expands its enterprise influence, you're bound to run into the company's application infrastructure sooner or later. When you do, adopt the three keys above and you'll be able to monitor the entire Oracle applications stack and gain the performance insight needed to keep your Oracle-driven business solutions running at peak efficiency and maximum performance.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.