EM12c: What's new in Fusion Middleware Plug-in 12.1.0.4?

With EM PS2 (12.1.0.3) release, FMW plugin 12.1.0.4 has been released.
Main features of this plugin are listed below:

SOA Management Features

Enhancements to SOA Fault Management
SOA administrators can now perform comprehensive fault management directly from Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, including search and single and bulk fault recovery. This new feature replaces all of the previous faults and reject messages tabs and regions at the composite level with the top-level search and resubmit.

RAC support for SOA Dehydration Monitoring
SOA Dehydration store monitoring in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control now supports RAC databases.

Monitoring and Diagnostics Features
Enhancements to Auto Discovery for Oracle Fusion Middleware and WebLogic DomainsManagement Agent-based auto discovery for Oracle Fusion Middleware is now enabled automatically with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. In addition, administrators who use agent-based auto discovery for Oracle Fusion Middleware are no longer required to specify the Oracle Middleware home for each host that the discovery module runs on.

Enhancements to Fusion Middleware and WebLogic Domain Discovery
When adding Fusion Middleware and WebLogic Domain targets to Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, administrators can now choose whether to discover all versions of deployed Java EE applications or just the active version of deployed applications. This provides more flexibility and control in terms of what to centrally manage and monitor from the Cloud Control console.

For each Java EE application that is discovered, a new domain application deployment target is also added. This domain application deployment target provides a single view of the application across the entire domain, rather than a more granular view at the server or cluster levels.

WebLogic Server 12.1.2 ManagementBeginning with this release, administrators are able to discover and centrally manage their WebLogic Server version 12.1.2 deployments. All existing management features continue
to be supported with WebLogic Server version 12.1.2, including:

•     Performance management
•     Business Transaction Management
•     Process control
•     Configuration management
•     Cloning middleware and scaling up/out domain
•     Patching

Support for Managing Oracle GlassFish Domains
Administrators can now discover and centrally manage their open source as well as commercial versions of Oracle GlassFish domains in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console. Management features for Oracle GlassFish include:

•     Performance management – monitor Oracle GlassFish availability and performance out-of-box, track such data historically, and receive notifications of potential problems.
•     Process control – submit predefined job to start, restart, or stop Oracle GlassFish components.
•     Configuration management – perform extensive analysis (for example, search, compare, track change) against automatic, daily collections of Oracle GlassFish data.

Having a single interface for managing Oracle GlassFish software along side other data center environments such as databases and operating systems is critical to ensuring
applications are available and performing at an optimal level.

Exalytics ManagementWith the introduction of the Exalytics target, Exalytics management is now consistent with other engineered systems. Both virtual and physical deployments will be supported for
this target. The feature includes guided discovery, a personalizable software dashboard, routing topology, and vCPU usage reporting.

These features align Exalytics management with the Engineered Systems Management story and show a tighter integration between Exalytics and Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.

The new features improve the user's management experience and productivity. The vCPU reporting supports the reporting and auditing requirement for virtualized environments using vCPU licensing.

JVMD/ADP Installation and UpgradeYou can now automate the deletion of JVMD/ADP engines and agents. This feature is available from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control user interface. Previously deletion or
undeployment required manual steps.

Updates to the Middleware Summary PageThe Middleware Summary page (accessible by selecting Middleware from the Targets menu) has traditionally displayed a table with the status and health of middleware software
managed by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.

Beginning with this release, administrators can now choose to display a graphical view of the same data. This graphical view is similar to a heat map where targets are represented as boxes and the size and color of each box depicts a potential problem areas. Such a view enables administrators to quickly analyze a large amount of data, customize filtering, and pinpoint problems more efficiently.

The Middleware Summary page also provides predefined searches that filter the target types shown in both of the table as well as graph views. The searches available are based on what middleware targets have been discovered by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. The most recent search selected is saved as the default search to display when returning to the Middleware Summary page. Saved searches enable administrators to find what they are looking for faster.

Monitor Oracle Jolt Performance Metrics
Administrators can now monitor Oracle Jolt performance metrics including maximum capacity, pending requests, pool state, request errors (per minute), and requests (per minute).

Such metrics are available from the WebLogic Server target when Oracle Tuxedo and WebLogic are configured to use Oracle Jolt.

WebLogic Cluster Performance Summary Page Supported for Non-Oracle JRF Enabled Clusters
The WebLogic Cluster Performance Summary page no longer requires you to enable Oracle Java Required Files (JRF) on the cluster. Performance metric data appears on the summary page regardless of whether or not the cluster is Oracle JRF enabled.

Oracle Exalogic Management Enhancements
The following new features related to Exalogic Management help provide enhanced operational visibility:

• Control Stack monitoring for virtualized Exalogic systems enables administrators to view the status of the software infrastructure.
• It is now possible to send Enterprise Manager Ops Center hardware alarms and alerts to Enterprise Manager Cloud Control's incident management system and manage hardware and software incidents from a single pane of glass.
• Exacheck target now appears in the Exalogic Navigation Tree providing in-context navigation to Exacheck results.
• Additional performance and filtering optimizations has been made to the Exalogic Software Dashboard.
• Exalogic BI Publisher Reporting has been enhanced.

Diagnostic Snapshot EnhancementsAdministrators have traditionally been able to create a diagnostic snapshot from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console whenever a middleware-related issue occurs, and then analyze the diagnostic snapshot in offline mode either from the same Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instance that generated the snapshot or from a completely different Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instance (for example, when the snapshot is sent to Oracle Support for analysis). This release includes the following enhancements to the Diagnostic Snapshot feature:

• Archived logs for WebLogic Server and JVM targets can be included in a new diagnostic snapshot.
• You can create a diagnostic snapshot through the EMCLI.
• You can include diagnostic snapshots in a Support Workbench incident.

These additional Diagnostic Snapshot capabilities reduce the resolution time of external bugs related to Fusion Middleware software.

Archived Log Files Supported in Log Viewer
Administrators can now use Log Viewer to view and correlate messages across archived log files for Fusion Middleware components. In the past, Log Viewer supported viewing and correlating messages from active log files only. Including archived log files in Log Viewer helps administrators to diagnose and resolve performance problems that may have
occurred in the past.

Lifecycle Management Features

Enhancements to Cloning and Scaling Up/Out MiddlewareAdministrators can now use the Provision Middleware or Scale Up/Scale Out Middleware deployment procedures to clone or scale up/out a WebLogic Domain that has its administration port enabled or a domain that accepts only secure SSL traffic. Prior versions of the deployment procedures did not support cloning or scaling up/out of such a configured domain.

In addition, these same procedures now support entering credentials for each host destination individually (applicable in situations where preferred credentials are not used).

Administration Features

Enhancements to Fusion Middleware Process Control Job
The out-of-box job for Fusion Middleware Process Control now offers options for how to start, restart, or stop WebLogic Server targets. Administrators can configure the job to
use. Node Manager, the default script in the domain home, or a custom script. These same options are also available when you initiate a start, stop, or restart operation from target home pages or target menus. This feature gives administrators maximum flexibility in managing and maintaining WebLogic environments.

Perform Administration Operations Against Fusion Middleware
Key administration operations previously available from the Fusion Middleware Control console and WebLogic Server Administration Console are now available from the Cloud Control console. These operations include:

• Locking a domain configuration through the Change Center before making changes to prevent other administrators from making changes during your edit session. You can also
• view all changes that have been saved, view the server instances that must be restarted for configuration changes to take effect, release a lock, and activate or undo changes.
• Viewing, configuring, and using MBeans for a specific Oracle WebLogic Server or Application Deployment target through the System MBean browser.
• Managing JDBC data sources - including the ability to create, edit, delete, control and test JDBC data sources.
• Recording configuration actions performed as a series of WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) commands. You can use WLST to replay the commands to help automate the task of configuring a domain. You can start, stop, or view a recording.

Having a single tool for both monitoring and administering Fusion Middleware components simplifies an administrator's job and increases productivity.

Selective Tracing for Oracle Fusion Middleware
Administrators can now perform selective tracing from the Cloud Control console. Selective tracing enables administrators to gain more fine-grained logging data but limit the
data so that it applies to a specific application name as well as other specific attributes of a request (for example, user name, client host, or web service port). Having such detailed yet focused log data assists administrators while diagnosing problems with applications and their underlying infrastructure.

Privilege Propagating Support for Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Application Server Related TargetsBeginning with this release, the following Oracle Fusion Middleware related target types support privilege propagation:

• Oracle WebLogic Domain
• Oracle WebLogic Cluster
• Oracle WebLogic Server
• Domain Application Deployment
• Clustered Application Deployment
• Oracle Application Server
• Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J)

This support enables administrators to have privileges automatically propagate to members of a target, rather than requiring the administrator to manually grant other administrators privileges to each target individually. You can grant to an administrator or a role a privilege on one of the listed targets once and have that same privilege automatically propagate to any new member of that target.

For example, granting operator privilege on a WebLogic Domain target to an administrator grants the administrator the operator privilege on the domain's member targets (for example, clusters, servers, deployed applications) and also to any members that will be added to the domain in the future. Automation of privilege propagation across these additional Fusion Middleware targets enables administrators to be more effective and efficient in managing their middleware software.

Log Configuration for Oracle Fusion Middleware Components
Beginning with this release, administrators can configure log file settings for Oracle WebLogic Server, Application Deployment, SOA Infrastructure, Essbase Server, Directory
Integration Platform Server, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Reports Application, Oracle Reports Bridge, Oracle Reports Server, and Oracle Reports Tools targets. Configuration
settings exposed in the Cloud Control console user interface include:

• Location of the log file
• Format of the log messages in the log file (For example, Oracle Diagnostic Logging – Text, Oracle Diagnostic Logging – XML)
• Log level for both persistent loggers and active runtime loggers
• Rotation policies – either size based or time based – used for the log file

User Interface Updates for Site Guard Operations
You can use the new Site Guard user interface to create, execute, and monitor operation plans for switchover, failover, start, and stop.

RUEI Metric Page
The RUEI Metric page uses the same search mechanism as the Session Diagnostics page but here the result set is displayed in the Metric Correlation Chart where RUEI metrics can
be compared against all other system metrics and be displayed in time. This means that End User Page Load times can be presented in time compared with Java active threads or
system CPU usage to discover possible connections. Any view can be stored in the correlation chart. This page can also be directly opened from any RUEI event from the Events and Incidents console. All RUEI events have a link to the metrics page and when selected, the Metric page opens in context of the right metric filters and time period immediately.

JVM Real-Time Thread State
This regions displays a list of all of the JVMs that are associate with the Business Application. It provides a per JVM view of real-time status based on the JVM thread
activities. You are presented with thread counts of specific activities and states including DB Wait, IO Wait, Runnable, and Idle. The number of threads counted in a specific
state reflects how much work a JVM is performing on that area. For example, a larger than normal thread count in DB Wait state suggests a slower than normal DB response time.

The region also provides direct access to the JVM Diagnostic pages for more detailed investigation. This region is updated with real-time data every 30 seconds.
JVM Active Threads

This region provides an overtime view of the data presented by the JVM real-time Thread State region. The data is summarized across all of the JVM and presented for the last 24
hours.

Application Replay
Application Replay enables you to perform realistic production scale testing of your web and packaged Oracle applications. It provides the most efficient and highest quality
testing through zero overhead workload capture and without any need for script development and maintenance. The captured workload can then be replayed with production characteristics on a test system to validate application infrastructure changes from the middle tier to the disk.

Application Replay Enhancements

Note:
These enhancements are new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

After a successful replay, users were able to view reports to analyze, capture, and replay results. The reporting mainly focused on application page names and addressed questions such as what was the performance of the page and which pages diverged compared to capture.

Now users have the ability to not only look at page level diagnostics but also session level diagnostics. With this new ability, you can answer questions such as which sessions
showed poor performance and then quickly identify the pages where the session was experiencing poor performance.

Additionally, to ensure that a page's poor performance is not caused by setup issues, a divergence report showing differences between the capture and replay of pages is provided. Similarly, when ensuring that a session's performance is not due to a divergence between capture and replay, users were required to view the raw HTTP requests and
response contents manually and compare the difference. Now users can simply export a packaged zip file containing capture and replay content and diagnostics and import that into Oracle Application Testing Suite's OpenScript. Doing this enables an automated and visual comparison of capture and replay of a specific session, drastically reducing the time
to identify any divergence or potential performance issues.

These diagnostics improvements enable deeper analysis of replay results quickly and reduce the time to isolate potential issues in a replay environment with perspective of end
user sessions.

For more details, pls refer http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/doc.121/e25353/whats_new.htm#CJAGBIEC