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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.

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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.

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Most organizations approach OpenTelemetry as a collection of individual tools they need to assemble from scratch. This view misses the bigger picture. OpenTelemetry is a complete telemetry framework with composable components that address specific problems at different stages of organizational maturity. You start with what you need today and adopt additional pieces as your observability practices evolve ...

One of the earliest lessons I learned from architecting throughput-heavy services is that simplicity wins repeatedly: fewer moving parts, loosely coupled execution (fewer synchronous calls), and precise timing metering. You want data and decisions to travel the shortest possible path. The goal is to build a system where every strategy and each line of code (contention is the key metric) complements the decision trees ...

As discussions around AI "autonomous coworkers" accelerate, many industry projections assume that agents will soon operate alongside human staff in making decisions, taking actions, and managing tasks with minimal oversight. But a growing number of critics (including some of the developers building these systems) argue that the industry still has a long way to go to be able to treat AI agents like fully trusted teammates ...

Enterprise AI has entered a transformational phase where, according to Digitate's recently released survey, Agentic AI and the Future of Enterprise IT, companies are moving beyond traditional automation toward Agentic AI systems designed to reason, adapt, and collaborate alongside human teams ...

The numbers back this urgency up. A recent Zapier survey shows that 92% of enterprises now treat AI as a top priority. Leaders want it, and teams are clamoring for it. But if you look closer at the operations of these companies, you see a different picture. The rollout is slow. The results are often delayed. There's a disconnect between what leaders want and what their technical infrastructure can handle ...

Kyndryl's 2025 Readiness Report revealed that 61% of global business and technology leaders report increasing pressure from boards and regulators to prove AI's ROI. As the technology evolves and expectations continue to rise, leaders are compelled to generate and prove impact before scaling further. This will lead to a decisive turning point in 2026 ...

Cloudflare's disruption illustrates how quickly a single provider's issue cascades into widespread exposure. Many organizations don't fully realize how tightly their systems are coupled to thirdparty services, or how quickly availability and security concerns align when those services falter ... You can't avoid these dependencies, but you can understand them ...

If you work with AI, you know this story. A model performs during testing, looks great in early reviews, works perfectly in production and then slowly loses relevance after operating for a while. Everything on the surface looks perfect — pipelines are running, predictions or recommendations are error-free, data quality checks show green; yet outcomes don't meet the ground reality. This pattern often repeats across enterprise AI programs. Take for example, a mid-sized retail banking and wealth-management firm with heavy investments in AI-powered risk analytics, fraud detection and personalized credit-decisioning systems. The model worked well for a while, but transactions increased, so did false positives by 18% ...

Basic uptime is no longer the gold standard. By 2026, network monitoring must do more than report status, it must explain performance in a hybrid-first world. Networks are no longer just static support systems; they are agile, distributed architectures that sit at the very heart of the customer experience and the business outcomes ... The following five trends represent the new standard for network health, providing a blueprint for teams to move from reactive troubleshooting to a proactive, integrated future ...

APMdigest's Predictions Series concludes with 2026 AI Predictions — industry experts offer predictions on how AI and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 5, the final installment, covers AI's impacts on IT teams ...