How and why you should set target lifecycle status properties in EM12c

If, like me, you’re using EM12c after you were already plenty familiar with EM11g, you may have missed an important detail in the EM12c new features guide.

From New Features in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

Each target now has a lifecycle status target property which can be set to one of the following values: mission critical, production, staging, test, or development. This target property is used to specify the priority by which data from the target should be handled. When Enterprise Manager is under a heavy load, targets where the value of the lifecycle property is mission critical or production are treated with higher priority than targets where the value of the lifecycle property is staging, test, or development. Setting the priorities of your most important targets ensures that even as your data center grows and the number of managed targets grows, your most important targets continue to be treated at high priority.

You may not use some of the other new features like administration groups or lifecycle management, but it’s still very much worth your while to set the lifecycle status target property. After all, you’re more concerned about alerts and monitoring on your mission critical and other production systems than you are on the staging and test systems, so why not tell EM12c about that and gain the benefits of target prioritization?

If you have quite a few targets it can be quite tedious to step through them all in the GUI interface to set this property. It works, but it’ll take a while. Enter emcli. Rob Zoeteweij has covered the setup of EMCLI in his blog post Installing EMCLI on EM12c so I won’t repeat that here other than to add that with the release of EM12cR2 there is no longer a JDK in the $OMS_HOME so if you’re running 12.1.0.2 you should amend his instructions as follows:


oracle@omshost$ export JAVA_HOME=$OMS_HOME/../jdk16/jdk
oracle@omshost$ export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
oracle@omshost$ export ORACLE_HOME=$OMS_HOME
oracle@omshost$ cd $ORACLE_HOME
oracle@omshost$ mkdir emcli
oracle@omshost$ java -jar $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/jlib/emclikit.jar client -install_dir=$ORACLE_HOME/emcli
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2.
Copyright (c) 1996, 2012 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.

EM CLI client-side install completed successfully.
oracle@omshost$ $ORACLE_HOME/emcli/emcli setup -url=https://omshost.domain.com:7803/em -username=sysman
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2.
Copyright (c) 1996, 2012 Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Enter password

Warning: This certificate has not been identified as trusted in the local trust store
--------------------------------------
[certificate details snipped]
--------------------------------------
Do you trust the certificate chain? [yes/no] yes
Emcli setup successful

Once you have emcli running you can easily create files containing the target properties you would like to set, including the target lifecycle status, and apply them in bulk to your EM12c installation.

For the example I will demonstrate setting the target lifecycle status property for host targets. First you need to produce a list of your host targets, formatted for eventual input to the set_target_property_value verb:

oracle@omshost$ ./emcli get_targets -noheader -script -targets=host | awk '{print $4":"$3":LifeCycle Status:"}' > /tmp/targets

As another example, from commenter Bill Korb, to produce a list of database targets, including any currently under blackout, run:

oracle@omshost$ ./emcli get_targets -noheader -format='name:script;column_separator:|;' -targets='%database%' | awk -F\| '{print $4":"$3":LifeCycle Status:"}' > /tmp/targets

Edit the resulting file, appending the host or database’s lifecycle stage to each line. Be aware of the predefined lifecycle stages provided by Oracle, which are listed below in order of precedence:

1. MissionCritical
2. Production
3. Stage
4. Test
5. Development

You can modify the names of these lifecycle stages with the modify_lifecycle_stage_name verb if you wish. Your file should now look something like:

dev1.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Development
omshost.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:MissionCritical
prod1.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Production
prod2.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Production
prod3.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Production
prod4.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Production
stage1.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Stage
test1.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Test
test2.domain.com:host:LifeCycle Status:Test


Now make the call to emcli to load your target property definitions into the OMS:

oracle@omshost$ ./emcli set_target_property_value -property_records="REC_FILE" -input_file="REC_FILE:/tmp/targets" -separator=property_records="\n"

There you go. Your hosts are now updated with appropriate target lifecycle stages and the OMS will prioritize them based on these settings whenever the OMS is under high load. Repeat this for your listeners (-targets=oracle_listener), database instances (-targets=oracle_database) and so on until all of your targets have a lifecycle stage assigned. I’ve broken these out by target type for simplicity of documentation, but you can also just produce a single large file containing the lifecycle status for all of your targets and load the whole thing at once. This same technique works to assign a contact, comment, location, or any other target property you find useful.

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