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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

~ from Technology to Music

Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Monthly Archives: November 2015

Cloud Document Security

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

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Cloud, CSA, Security

So an interesting piece of research was published by the Cloud Security Alliance. The research shows the growth of document sharing in the enterprise through the use of cloud services.  The interesting thing is one of the positives of adopting SaaS and PaaS is easing the challenge of ensuring environments are patched for security. But at the same time the need to educate the wider employee community even more on being security aware.

It also raises the question of managing the accidental or deliberate leakage in such an environment. As the article says, some sharing of documents to the public or 3rd parties to enable cross business collaboration may well be legitimate so businesses are going to need strategies to address this.

Ace’d It

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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Ace, Associate, Oracle

o_aceassociatelogoribbon_clr-largeIt appears to be fairly common for people when they are invited onto the Oracle Ace program to blog about it (like this). Understandably so as it is no small achievement. And guess what, I have been invited to join the program as an Associate.  So with a bit of meme, here is why the Ace program is important to me, and perhaps why my view is a little different.

So what makes my story any different? Well, if you look at the membership of the Ace programme a significant proportion of the membership are people working for organisations who are Oracle partners; but for me I work for an end user organisation, so don’t get the opportunity to leverage the additional benefits of the Oracle Partner Network.

The benefits for a partner to have Oracle Ace’s are clear – sending a message to potential customers we have expertise and to Oracle to show the commitment to the partnership.  But what does it mean to me for an end user organisation who have no need for those types of signal?

Well for my employer it means several things firstly, it helps show the company as a progressive organisation who invests in its people. The investment in my case has been membership to user groups (UKOUG, OAUG), the chance to get out of the office and attend those invaluable SIG sessions along with conference events, such as Oracle UK’s one day sessions along with Open World. This not to say the pursuit  of this goal hasn’t meant a fair bit of personal hard graft.

There is a saying that goes ‘knowledge is power‘; in my view the power  only manifests itself properly when the used for the benefit of all. Or put it another way share what you know. Sharing knowledge when you know has, or will benefit others is greatly rewarding. It is that sense or reward that propelled me forwards with the Ace program. So if you come across something that helps, then it’s always worth telling the author you appreciated the effort, that can be simply liking a post or retweeting or sharing it. But preparing that information to be shared does take effort, sometimes a lot of effort.

Aside from the reward from sharing knowledge, there are other benefits. Like most in the more engineering aspects of IT, I am not an naturally gregarious person, so social discourse is hardwork, but activities that have lead to the Ace have provided a foundation on which conversations can be easily started.

The final reward, is in many respects rather selfish, in so far as it demonstrates to the  wider world recognition of my capabilities. Yes, you could do this by attending training courses and siting the relevant Oracle exams. But as an EA making a case for very hands on training is very difficult, it’s not as if the resultant skills will get practised everyday. The one relevant Oracle training stream (Certified Architecture Specialist) is actually only offered to partners. So again, graft needed to self educate (some might say this is the cost of working in this industry). But comes back to, why do training if you’re not going to share the benefit of it?

So being true to my on recommendation,  I’d like to thank Simon Haslam  at Veriton as my Ace sponsor.

Faithless live

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Music

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2.0, concert, Faithless, live

 Faithless performed at Alexandria Palace last night in support of their new remix compilation album.  


When they performed the big hits the place was pulsing, but in the chilled numbers the audience seemed to lose attention – shame really as it took the edge off a good performance.

  
More photos available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mp3monster/sets/72157660900174080

A single pane of glass to manage and monitor with?

19 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cloud Control, Enterprise Manager, monitoring, OEM, Oracle

So a strong message for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud Control is the ‘Single Pane of Glass’ on your IT systems. It isn’t Just Oracle who will make this case, you can expect it from all the general purpose monitoring products ranging from ManageEngine to the CA products and into Nagios. That’s before the general press articles (e.g. InformationWeek). But what I wanted to do is examine the case and potential for OEM to meet this aspiration and the sort of things that will help a tool achieve this magical goal.

Why examine the case? Well some will tell you ‘single pane of glass’ is not the best goal (e.g. TechTarget). In addition to which some vendors have a reputation of being very strong in some specific areas – for example SolarWinds for network monitoring. Finally, it is common for the larger product vendors (IBM/CA/Oracle) to offer monitoring capabilities that are strong for their own products but not so great beyond that (so if you’re running a number of Oracle products the buy OEM; IBM then consider Tivoli Monitoring and so on).

catalog-sprawl

So can OEM reach beyond Oracle products?  What does it offer to do this? Well starting with our first question, the answer is simply yes, it can do more than Oracle. So let’s look at the means through which OEM can reach beyond prebuilt monitoring for its own products.

Firstly, as a Java solution is is naturally able to exploit JMX to the maximum. This is ideal for Java solutions (assuming they are suitably instrumented with MBeans). So your custom java apps running in your Weblogic container can be easily monitored. But this is an ever shrinking estate as more solutions become available from vendors and SaaS providers, and what if you’ve got specialist hardware as could be expected with a manufacturer?

So the next stop is the ability to monitor web services.  OEM provides the tools to generate monitoring configurations that can invoke a web service. The tooling achieves this by parsing a WSDL file which works out what services are available and allowing you to select a service to invoke.  So you can then invoke the service. However the information you capture reflects things like basic performance measures and fault responses.

There is support for the WS-Management standard which is  overseen by the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force). WS-Management although also ratified as an ISO standard is a bit of an oddity given the majority of WS-* standards are covered by OASIS. That said WS-Management has all the major players you would expect involved (EMC, IBM, Oracle and so on). If you wanted to instrument your product using this protocol then there are open source implementations that may help jump start that initiative. Although it has to be said, that a lot of adoption of this standard has come from OS/platform & hardware vendors. I am unaware of an equivalent capability for REST engagement at present, however the REST framework used by Weblogic can provide additional monitoring insights that could be harvested.

plugindevelopmentdiagram

One answer is the Extensibility Development Kit which allows vendors to build their own product plugins for OEM. These can then be offered by the vendors directly or through the Exchange Oracle has provided.  It is worth noting that not all vendors are building these plugins, they may come from third parties. For example there are 2 plugins for F5 BigIP – one from F5 themselves, and another through a software house called Comtrade. If there is a plugin available from a 3rd party rather than a vendor, you do have the opportunity to see if the vendor has used the Oracle Partner programme to validate their plugin (background here). Although I have to say that the Exchange is a disappointing platform. Of course there is nothing to stop customers building their own plugins using this framework.

There is also a .Net specific framework as well to build monitoring for a Windows environment.

Next option is use of system level information capture so you can hook up SNMP traps, or log file monitoring.  The log file monitoring is relatively simplistic in so far as it effectively tracks a log file scanning for occurrences of that match Perl expressions. This is unfortunately relatively simple compared to some more sophisticated log management mechanisms where you can describe the log file layout and attribute semantic meaning to perform more intelligent log monitoring as a result.

fig1_1

Of course in all this, there is the human perspective which from my experience, when it comes to IT tools things can take on something of a zealous perspective (another being IDEs in the Java world). In Oracle’s perspective an answer other than using OEM as the single pain of glass isn’t desirable. But the reality is that customers will license OEM to make it easy to manage the Oracle products and want to use something else for the single pane.  OEM does accommodate this situation with connectors for Events and Ticketing. Again connectors can be built by other vendors or yourself and the Exchange  offers these as well. Additionally there is a bidirectional exchange connector available for the reversed role, so if you want to bring in additional data such as BAM measures or data points/events from 3rd party tools such as SolarWinds you can.

If you’re going to leverage multiple products you probably want to consider developing a portal for bringing the UIs of the different tools together. So you can start with the single pane view, but as you drill down in analysis of either an operational issue or even just a simple SLA performance failure.

So for on premise systems, even if they’re not out of the box friendly to OEM you can with a bit of effort build out monitoring capabilities from a very quick error detection or occurrence of log messages count through to creating custom extensions that can ‘probe’ more effectively the target. But SaaS is a bit more challenging, you have the Web service invocation capability, although service providers are more and more frequently offering REST interfaces that are JSON conversent.  Beyond again building custom capabilities the next option is to exploit OEM enhancing products such as Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) – a very powerful tool that reaches far beyond the norm of operational monitoring and awareness to provide analytics on websites.

So back to my second question – it is possible to get OEM to offer a single pane of glass?  Unless you’re one of the few organisations that is a pure Oracle only environment then you’re likely to have to configure/build out additional capabilities and potentially invest in additional products (RUEI isn’t presented as a plugin and its capabilities extend beyond that of a plugin) to stand a chance of succeeding.  There is no doubt that OEM offers plenty of extensibility potential – the points of extension go beyond those described here.  It does raise the question of how OEM custom extensions could migrate to the cloud monitoring offering.

We may write a future blog on OEM to show how these plugins can be actually implemented.

OEM Resources:

  • OEM Documentation (general), Extensibility Development Kit
  • OEM Blog
  • OEM Extension Exchange
  • Hooking up SNMP Traps
  • Creating Data Exchange Connectors
  • Web Service Monitoring
  • WS-Management standard
  • .Net specific framework
  • Cloud Monitoring Strategies

Using Business Capability Models to inform Tech Training Requirements

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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Capability models, EA, OEA, TOGAF

We have been going through a slow process of reviewing and refreshing our skills and capabilities within our Architectural team both in terms of what skills exist, and the necessary skill sets that need to be cultivated.

The EA capabilities views such as the Oracle one below which has been drawn from Oracle’s reference model (ITSO) can be used to aide determining what technical capabilities are needed in the solution space. But could also be used to support the determination of skills needs within an organisation in both breadth and to an extent depth.

Where the breadth equates to skills for all the tools mapped onto the technical capability model (ideally validated by mapping the technical capabilities to business capability model to establish utilisation). That mapping also informs the skills depth based on the number of times anyone technical capability is mapped to the business model.

OracleIntegrationRA-capabilities

This can be taken further through the use of value chains in the business domain you can determine which capabilities need to be focused on, therefore what technical capabilities and potential skills development are of most value to your organisation.

So what starts out as an abstract business activity, quickly delivers technical domain value. What is ‘fun’ is that as a Technical EA I can use the work from my business colleagues to make a compelling argument for training budget.

Useful links:

  • http://timreview.ca/article/802
  • http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/itso-165161.html
  • http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/oracle-ra-integration-r3-0-176700.pdf 
  • http://enterprisearchitects.com/getting-started-with-a-capability-model/ 
  • http://www.aprocessgroup.com/myapg/architecture/ea-value-chain-aea-webinar-1/

Oracle Open World – Session Presentations

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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OOW, Oracle, presentations

Some time after Open World all (well nearly) the presentation material is made available to attendees. Some presenters however don’t wait for that and their presentation material available online through their own various channels. So here are some links to those that I have become aware of:

  • http://www.slideshare.net/brunoborges/presentations – Java & PaaS
  • http://www.slideshare.net/lucbors/real-life-maf-22-oracle-open-world-2015 Real Life MAF
  • http://www.talkapex.com/2015/10/oow-15-presentations.html – Apex
  • http://www.slideshare.net/BobbyCurtisMBA/database-as-a-service-oem-oda-oow-15-presentation – OEM 12c &  DB appliance
  • http://debrasoracle.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/oow15-my-presentation-forming-your.html – Fusion Apps & Cloud Migration
  • http://www.slideshare.net/Veriton – Oracle DB Appliance
  • http://andrejusb.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/oow15-session-slides-oracle-alta-ui.html – Alta UI
  • Tips and Tricks for Oracle SOA Suite https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5sPDQfAYEUAUjlWbXBoTjhGRVk/view 
  • AMIS’ OOW15 comprehensive reviews in multiple parts:
    • part 1 http://www.slideshare.net/AMIS_Services/amis-oracle-openworld-2015-review-part-1-overview-main-themes-announcements-and-future-roadmaps
    • part 2 http://www.slideshare.net/AMIS_Services/amis-oracle-openworld-2015-review-part-2-hardware-iaas-and-paas-cloud-foundation-jcs-wls?related=1
    • part 3 http://www.slideshare.net/AMIS_Services/amis-oracle-openworld-2015-review-part-3-paas-database-integration-identity-mgt-it-ops-and-devops?related=2
    • part 4 http://www.slideshare.net/AMIS_Services/amis-oracle-openworld-2015-review-part-4-paas-application-development-javaone-mobile-collaboration-and-saas-and-user-experience?related=3
  • Richard Olrich on App Builder Cloud Service http://www.olrichs.nl/2015/11/oow15-coming-soon-abcservice.html

As I spot the posts we’ll update this blog entry

ITSO Mindmap

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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ITSO, mindmap, Oracle, xmind

I’ve just made the latest version of my IT Strategies from Oracle mindmap available via the XMind maps site (http://www.xmind.net/m/cPQH/)

ITSO

Oracle Open World 15 – The Recovery

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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OOW, Oracle, OTN

So we’re back home from a week in San Francisco and the city dominating Oracle Open World conference and almost straightened up after the jet lag (don’t remember ever suffering from it this much).

A very interesting, very busy week that was absolutely shattering (it didn’t help our Hotel was in the middle if the city, but not very sound insulated or air conditioned – so if you don’t sleep well not the best).

I’ll piece together a presentation deck, but briefly, what we picked up/did:

  • Oracle is a cloud company now – with the word cloud presented so many times in a week that the early morning mist (or is that thin cloud) on a couple of days in SF I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating it or whether it was genuine – it had disappeared by the time I was seeing presentations with the word cloud.
  • Oracle is getting hip with adoption of Docker and Open Stack.
  • Weblogic 12.2 announcements just before OOW somewhat swallowed up in all the other messages but I think this release will have some longer term subtle impacts, just like multi Tenancy database announcements lead  the subsequent cloud transition.
  • Oracle cloud isn’t all sales story – early adopters such as GE talked about their experiences
  • For those of you who want the benefit of cloud on premise – the hyperconvergence of Oracle hardware to SaaS solutions can be deployed on premise – or just the apps.
  • Conversations with Oracle Press and Bob Rhubart of OTN fame.
  • A day with the SOA product leadership – as part of the Customer Advisory Board. Can’t say what is happening but let’s say its all exciting.
  • Various meetings & receptions with Oracle UK and our strategic SIs, plus of course the obligatory Oracle Appreciation event
  • Investment in hardware to provide better security to protect against attacks like Heartbleed & Venom and some fancy new memory coming from Intel.

Checkout blogs such as this one and I’m sure a lot of other material will start coming through.

OOW 15 - Appreciation Event 2015

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