OK, so you have heard about PAM, you’ve read our legal notices and disclaimer and you are debating whether to give PAM a go. Worried about where to start? Well stop worrying, you don’t need to be going near your production environment any time soon....not until you are completely comfortable with what you are doing. One of the best things about PAM is that the software / tutorial packs have been sequenced in such a way that, provided you are using a fresh copy of production, you will get some early outputs you can use to improve your organisation’s OEBS efficiency. In fact, one of the most important features of the PAM initiative overall is that PAM will be released progressively as a series of 14 tutorial and accompanying FREE open source software. At the completion of the 13 software / tutorial packs you will have a fully functioning application monitor but oh so much more...along the way you will have learned how to use the information you are obtaining to improve the day to day efficiency of your OEBS application. This learning is just as important as the monitor itself as a monitor without knowledge of how to maximise the value of its outputs is of little use.

2. So what will the PAM software / tutorial packs cover?

Home | Pack 1 (Available) | Pack 2 (Available) | Pack 3 (Available) | Pack 4 (Available) | Pack 5 (Available) | Pack 6 (Available) |

Pack 7 (Available) | Pack 8 (Available) | Pack 9 (Available) | Pack 10 (Available) | Pack 11 | Pack 12 | Pack 13 | Pack 14 | Grand Finale | Disclaimer

SOFTWARE / TUTORIAL PACK	PRECIS
Pack 1: Your OEBS Application - an introspective Monitored items: Basic application usage profiling	The best OEBS system administrators intimately know and understand what is going on in their application on a daily basis and throughout the business cycle. For all the key factors that have the potential to impact performance and system health they know the answers. Eg: How many concurrent requests do you run per day how does this change with business peaks? Has the overall activity been increasing or decreasing over time What are the max concurrent users connected and when How hard are the web servers being hit All these questions and more will be answered in this software / tutorial pack; we will also show you how to use this information, including how to produce a monthly report on your OEBS application's monthly activity (A pro forma and example monthly report with guidelines are included in the pack) Note: The PAM collector will populate up to 31 days prior activity so you will have useful information straight away
Pack 2: Surviving performance pressure (business peaks survival tips) Monitored items: Performance profiling, managing workflow background processes	The skilled applications administrator understands the OEBS application’s performance profile and then develops strategies to manage it. In this software / tutorial pack you will learn… What is your application performance profile and how does it vary over time How is your application performance profile affected by cyclical business peaks How to know immediately if a performance issue is application related. Workflow background processes can tie your system in knots if you let them - Do you have too many running? How to get data for response time SLAs that means something to the business
Pack 3: Entropy antidotes (maintenance must haves for the more technically inclined) Monitored items: Index rebuild alert, New invalid objects	PAM is not database monitor (there are too many good Oracle database monitoring tools in the market already) but there are a couple of database related issues that are of interest to the systems administrator In this software / tutorial pack PAM alerts are installed to notify you about: Matters that may affect the normal running of your application Normal database maintenance tasks that are often forgotten
Pack 4: What to do when the sh#! hits the fan...	Unless you did something you’re not supposed to, it’s actually not your fault if there is an issue. This software / tutorial pack provides tools to use when things do go wrong so you can understand the scale of impact and proactively manage the fallout. You can answer questions such as: Who was doing what? Who was affected by the issue Were any on line external customers impacted?
Pack 5: Cunningly clairvoyant (Am I having a bad day?) Monitored items: CR activity, Maintenance mode alert	The alerts in this software / tutorial pack help you get ahead of those business complaints by letting you know about those typical things that go wrong as and when they occur. This will enable you to get ahead on any related issues enabling you to proactively manage your OEBS application and its user community. Items covered include: Error requests Total requests Warning requests Maintenance mode ICM down
Pack 6: What lurks beneath... Monitored items: Workflow activity	Workflow is typically the most poorly managed aspect of the OEBS application resulting in significant wasted resources both human and machine. This software / tutorial pack gives you the vital information you need to help improve workflow management and performance.
Pack 7: Tools to manage user behaviour through fear and guilt (I know what you did and when you did it) Monitored items: Queue management, duplicate and long running requests	Every systems administrator knows this story…. after many conversations your users know what buggers up the system but they continue to do it anyway, and usually at the busiest times like month end. This software / tutorial pack shows you how to seek out the guilty…
Pack 8: Basic Security Salvos Monitored items: Aged User Accounts, Unsuccessful logins, Monitored Accounts	Good systems administrators keep on top of matters that may be security issues. This software / tutorial pack has some basic timely reminders: Have you been removing old employees access? Are there any signs that someone may be maliciously trying to get access to the OEBS application
Pack 9: Basic User Activity Monitored items:Full Service sesions, Self service sessions, Self service Page requests	Each application user connection require application resources, often organisations are in a position where resources including web services (in the case of self service session) are limited and we know that once we exceed the certain number of connected users the overall application slows down and all users experience degradation in performance. This tutorial also delves into user activity profiling
Pack 10: Monitoring Database Session Statistics Monitored items: One or more of the 240+ database session statistics	There can be a high correlation between some sessions stat levels and performance slow downs so these are the session stats the expert administrator likes to keep an eye on. In this tutorial / software pack we will show how PAM: Monitors and records databases session statistics information Alerts when database session statistics exceed threshold values Reports on session statistic activity The final part of this tutorial is a PAM alert when patches have been applied to your application.
Pack 11: - How is your day going (really)? Monitored items: Detailed intra day Concurrent managers and User activity	Ever wondered: What is happening in your application when you are not looking? What is happening in your application when you are not looking? How does your activity profile differ over month end to normal processing times? The information collected with this PAM tutorial / software release will provide invaluable detailed application profiling information.
Pack 12: The happy housekeeper’s spring cleaning guide Monitored items: Aged on hold requests, Maintenance program missing	This software / tutorial pack helps you: Identify some of the rubbish you will want to get out of the system Ensure your standard maintenance program doesn’t go off the rails
Pack 13: Business bottlenecks busters (or how to make you look good) Monitored items: Long running workflows , Old active workflows	We revisit that perennial performance pest Workflow - This software / tutorial pack gives you vital information to help clean up workflow
Pack 14: On top of the game Monitored items: Session timeouts, SLA Renegotiation trigger, Setting PAM thresholds	This tutorial will help you show the business that you are on top of customer related and administrative issues in and about the OEBS application Good systems administrators keep proactively manage customers. This tutorial gives you plenty of information to help you eg Can you easily discern between your internal and external customers so you can manage the different group properly and professionally? Do you want to know how to tell how who and how many external customers were impacted by a performance problem so you can manage the fall out? Are your customers getting peed off because they are having to continually reconnect to you application? We introduce you to Auto thresholds which continually adjust your PAM alert thresholds as your business changes, these give you great tracking information to tell you what is changing over time and by how much to aid your forward planning.? It is a common misconception that SLAs are predominately about database and system response times when actually this is preferably only a small part and a good SLA should be about so much more. In this tutorial we will look at some trigger points for when you might want to renegotiate your SLAs
Grand Finale: Customising PAM	We show you how to customize PAM so it is even better at meeting your individual needs.

Future PAM tutorial content is subject to change without notice.

3. What happens first?

4. Pack release notification

PAM is ready and waiting to help you better manage your OEBS application and don’t forget its FREE so it will be worth the effort!