Saturday, March 08, 2014

Managing Oracle Big Data Appliance with Oracle Enterprise Manager

Oracle provides customers with a need to implement Hadoop based solutions the Oracle Big Data Appliance as an engineered system. As with most of the Oracle products, both hardware and software, Oracle is using Oracle Enterprise Manager as the primary monitoring and maintenance solution. For the big data appliance Oracle is providing the "Oracle Enterprise Manager System Monitoring Plug-in for Oracle Big Data Appliance" in the form of a OEM plugin that can be added to Oracle Enterprise Manager the moment you are adding a big data appliance to your IT landscape.

Even though managing Hadoop and tuning Hadoop is still the work for skilled people Oracle is making life a lot more easy with providing a ready build rack with both software and hardware that is tuned to work together. For example Mammoth is helping you in a great way during the initial setup of your big data appliance and during operation Oracle Enterprise Manager and the plugin will help you to monitor and manage the large part of the engineered system.

Due to the fact that most of the parts in the Oracle Big Data Appliance are build by Oracle and the other parts that are not manufactured by Oracle are in most of the other engineered system there is the option to show you virtually everything on both hardware and software level from within a single tool. As you can see from the below screenshot there is a visual recognizable representation of your hardware within the tool from where you can drill down to most of the components via the left pane menu.

Oracle Enterprise Manager for Oracle Big Data Appliance

Also it is providing you a single entry and screen to see on which node in your cluster which component is located and what there current status is. In the below screenshot you can see an overview of a cluster within the Oracle Big Data Appliance.

Oracle Enterprise Manager for Oracle Big Data Appliance

As you can see from the above screenshot it is providing you a software component overview broken up per server node. Each server node, represented as a record in the table, shows the status (if it is on this particular server node) of the namenode, failover node, journal node, data node, job tracker, task tracker or where ZooKeeper is.

All this can also be achieved by adding your own tooling however and scripting together. However, due to the fact that Oracle has had the option to both combine the hardware and the software and use for a large part technology that is already used in larger numbers for monitoring and maintenance you can be up and running in a fraction of the time that might be needed if you need to design and develop this yourself.

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