3 Keys to Maximizing Oracle Application Performance

Sridhar Iyengar
Learn more about ManageEngine

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
Learn more about ManageEngine

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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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Beyond Traditional Autoscaling: The Future of Kubernetes in AI Infrastructure

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI Drives Surge in Data Budgets

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned Architecture Causes Service Disruptions, High Operational Costs and Security Challenges

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

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A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

Will AI Solve the Growing Data Divide?

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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