PIPER-Rx
Oracle E-Business Suite Resource Centre

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 tutorial; 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

The skilled applications administrator understands the OEBS application’s performance profile and then develops strategies to manage it. In this tutorial 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

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 tutorial 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

Unless you did something you’re not supposed to, it’s actually not your fault if there is an issue. This tutorial 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?

The alerts in this tutorial 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

Workflow is typically the most poorly managed aspect of the OEBS application resulting in significant wasted resources both human and machine. This tutorial gives you the vital information you need to help improve workflow management and performance.

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 tutorial shows you how to seek out the guilty…

Good systems administrators keep on top of matters that may be security issues. This tutorial 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

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.

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 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.

Ever wondered:

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.

This tutorial helps you:

Ensure your standard maintenance program doesn’t go off the rails

Monitor for selected concurrent programs that have been submitted and or complete with a status of error or warning

Identify some of the rubbish you will want to get out of the system

We revisit that perennial performance pest Workflow - This tutorial gives you vital information to help manage and clean up workflow.

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 proactively manage customers. This tutorial gives you plenty of information to help you, e.g.:

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

We show you how to customize PAM so it is even better at meeting your individual needs.

In the IT world, the term “end to end” is predominantly based around internal application transactions or in effect any transaction that can be measured. When it comes to printing reports, my view (and most users) of end to end is the time taken from the moment the report is requested to the time it has completed printing. If a print request is in the print queue for a long period of time before it prints it should be considered as an overall performance issue.

In this PAM tutorial we aim to answer the following questions:

What have my printers been printing?

Who has been using my printers and when?

Are my printers load balanced?

Who has a printer defined at the profile options level?

Has a large print request been submitted?

and more...

E-mail is the main stay of communication these days, In this tutorial we check for incorrect e-mail address in the following application objects:

APPLSYS.FND_USER

HR.PER_PEOPLE_F

AR.RA_CONTACTS

AR.HZ_PARTIES

APPLSYS.WF_LOCAL_ROLES

APPLSYS.WF_LOCAL_USERS

When a record is changed in any of these objects the email account is validated against 12 validation checks including a PAM banned domains list, to highlight domains that are not acceptable for use for commercial communications. In the case of fnd_user when an application account is accessed the accounts email address will be validated.

Separate reports for each of the above mentioned objects are provided to list all relevant invalid email addresses.

Specialisation rules, easy to create difficult to maintain….

Ever wondered:

Why are my requests are running in multiple managers?

What a request type is?

What happens when a standalone request is run?

What specialisation rules you have in place, who crated them and when?

This tutorial covers all you need to know about specialisation rules and provides over 20 reports, allowing you to easily and quickly understand your specialisation rules.

So as to lighten the load on the concurrent managers we encourage our users to schedule their non-important / urgent requests to run during lower activity times such a lunch time and after hours. We also schedule normal activity and maintenance programs such as the Work flow background processes and maintenance purging for the same reasons.

However, based on experience, what we generally don’t do as part of a normal maintenance program is to re-visit our scheduled requests and keep them up to date and relevant. In this tutorial we check the following scheduled items:

Aged Scheduled Requests - Requests that have been hanging around forever.

Scheduled Request Creep - Scheduled requests that have crept into the working day.

Duplicate Scheduled Requests - Possible wasted processing.

In this tutorial we also cover the following PAM internal activities:

Preventing PAM alert backlogged e-mail storms (IN-013)

Maintenance Purge PAM data repositories (IN-014)