Interacting with the EM12c Console - Expert Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c - page 126

The last item we will look at in any detail is the My Oracle Support submenu. This provides access to four
commonly used areas of Oracle's online support tool. These are Service Requests, Knowledge Base, Certification
Information, and the My Oracle Support community forums. For any of these to work, you need to have configured
support integration as described earlier. I personally use only the Service Requests option, because the other
informational areas (knowledge base and community content) are, once My Oracle Support connectivity is
established, directly searchable from the search box at the top right of the Navigation bar.

■ one aspect of the support integration that may surprise you is that support pages are displayed from the
now-retired Flash interface to My oracle support. we expect this to change in future updates to the product.

Note

Finally, at the foot of the menu, looking suspiciously as through the designers couldn't find a better place, are the
Chargeback and Consolidation Planning features. These advanced features are outside the scope of this chapter.
Overall, the Enterprise menu gives you access to product- or enterprise-wide functionality and is the place you
should look for configuring or accessing enterprise management functionality. Before you leave this section, though,
you'll look at the reporting capabilities of the product in a little more depth.

Configuring Reports
Enterprise Manager is in a transitional stage at the time of this writing, moving away from Information Publisher,
which was the technology available in prior releases, towards Business Intelligence Publisher reporting, which offers
greatly enhanced formatting, scheduling, and distribution options. With 12c Release 2, you have two distinct options,
the first is a link to Information Publisher reports. (These are the only option available prior to 12c Release 2), but
have been superseded by BI Publisher Reports. Oracle provides an embedded license for BI Publisher with Enterprise
Manager, and this is clearly the way forward. At the moment, however, there are some restrictions, which we hope to
see relaxed in future releases.
Currently, only BI Publisher 11.1.0.6 (yes, that's four decimal places of release number) is supported, and then
only when loaded into the same WebLogic domain as Cloud Control. For all practical purposes, this means that you
will either have to extend the domain to include a new BI Publisher server, or install BI Publisher onto the existing
OMS servers. Either of these is a significant investment in complexity and management—and indeed come with
additional CPU, memory, and disk requirements. Hopefully, in the future, the reliance on the same domain can be
relaxed, and the BI Publisher templates can be installed either into an existing corporate BI Publisher environment
or a stand-alone BI Publisher instance. Finally, Oracle currently offers no guarantee of backward compatibility for
BI Publisher reports that you develop. This topic, therefore, does not cover BI Publisher reports because we consider
these restrictions to mean that it would be unwise to adopt BI Publisher at the time of writing.
If Information Publisher reports are chosen, you will be presented with a list of predefined reports, organized by
category, which will look something like the alphabetically presented list in Figure 4-33 .