New Policy Framework Features
As the size and complexity of heterogeneous systems increases and the number of distributed applications executing on these systems increases, the task of managing these resources can quickly become overwhelming to any system administration team. You need an automated approach for assisting you in detecting problems in your systems and then performing the actions required to correct the problems.
Policies define the desired behavior or characteristics of systems. By using preconfigured or customized policies, automated assessments of systems and applications are performed with you being notified of any deviations, such as inappropriate settings or incorrect system configurations. By automating these assessments, your productivity is significantly improved and you are able to more quickly identify systems that are not in compliance.
Policy Compliance
A policy is said to be compliant if it is determined that the managed targets meet the desired state; that is, the policy test did not identify any violation. Otherwise, a policy is said to be non-compliant if it has one or more policy violations.
The detection of a policy violation can optionally take action automatically to bring systems back into compliance. Corrective actions are special types of jobs that automatically execute in response to a policy violation.
Oracle provides out-of-box policy rules. Examples include the:
Open Ports security policy (on the Host target) that ensures that no unintended ports are left open
Weblogic Production Mode Enabled configuration policy (on the BEA Weblogic Managed Server target) that verifies that the Weblogic Server is running under production mode
Insufficient Redo Log Size storage policy (on the Database Instance target and the Cluster Database target) that checks for redo log files that are less than 1 MB
Periodically, the Oracle Management Agent on a target collects configuration information for the target and communicates that information over HTTPS to the Oracle Management Service, which stores it in the Oracle Management Repository. The Oracle Management Service then tests the collected data against the policies.
You can use Enterprise Manager to see whether targets in your enterprise (such as hosts, databases, and listeners) are compliant with the policies for those target types. The policies include different categories of policy rules, such as configuration, security, and storage rules. The policy rules are given different severity levels, including Critical, Warning, and Informational.
You can examine the policy violations for one or more targets and choose to fix or suppress individual violations. For more information about managing violations, see Managing and Viewing Policy Violations.
Related Topics
Managing and Viewing Policy Violations
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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