JD Edwards customers are renowned for maintaining highly competitive enterprises and operating efficiently in markets of every size in every geographic location. Operating efficiently entails keeping operational costs low while still driving innovation. It can be difficult, but it can be done.
Members of the Oracle JD Edwards team presented on how Server Manager, the nerve center for administration, provides JD Edwards customers with solutions that preserve their traditional high-value/low-TCO value proposition of running JD Edwards by proactively managing, effectively monitoring, and easily diagnosing faults in a wide range of JD Edward components.
Goals for Simplifying Administration
There were two goals for simplifying the administration of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.
- Reduce operational overhead.
- Increase operational efficiency and product quality.
Part of trying to reduce operational overhead was looking at chances to automate or provide self-service. The Detect, Decide, Do paradigm design for machines that mimics the UX One design of Alert, Analyze, Act for humans gives the opportunity to let machines automate certain processes and free up time for humans to focus on more valuable, creative tasks.
Increasing operational efficiency and product quality would come from continuous integration, delivery and deployment of products and features. Earlier integrations lead to code stability and reducing the complexity of release activities leads to an increased, accelerated feedback loop moving forward. Getting that feedback ultimately results in higher quality products in the future.
JD Edwards Environment Provisioning Self-Service
One of the first elements the team looked at was environment provisioning. They knew that saving time through minimal technical and operational overhead and offering self-service would be improvements to the process. This was one initiative that helped reduce overhead.
There is an available trial edition with a Deployment Server and DB, ENT, JAS and AIS server. This allows users to get environments up and running within a few hours at the most with the latest Tools set and latest Apps. They can get their development process started right away.
Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment
As part of the goal to improve efficiency and delivering quality products, JD Edwards has introduced continuous integration, delivery and deployment methodology into its process. The idea is to provide a faster loop of feedback to development groups so they can identify issues and provide fixes faster as they go through the development lifecycle. The feedback loop makes it possible to provide better quality products moving forward and makes it easier for developers to troubleshoot issues.
Package Build Automation
In order for users to deploy new features into their environment, they must do a full package build or update package. The JD Edwards development team saw a need for an automated build process to help users complete this task more efficiently. Client and server full packages are automatically scheduled and built with a third-party tool called Rundeck. The scheduled, automated update packages are run up to four times a day. Automated changes and patching can be done for both Apps update packages and Tools patching.
Server Manager REST APIs and Roadmap
In Tools 9.2.2.0, there are REST APIs available for authentication, provisioning, monitoring, and managing and updating operations in Server Manager. Some enhancements were made to Server Manager foundation and REST APIs in Tools 9.2.2.0. There were enhancements made to Diagnostic APIs for all servers, HTML Server and Enterprise Server. Other enhancements were made to SM Health Check APIs and ES/DB Provisioning APIs.
Further service enablement of Server Manager is one item on the roadmap that is still in the research phase. It will be the foundation for future simplifications. Server Manager is already equipped with provisioning, monitoring, and management capabilities, but the goal is to introduce and extend the REST enablement layer in Server Manager to expose more of these functionalities as REST APIs. This will enable the automation of common tasks and leverage standard-based Orchestration tools through more REST APIs for provisioning, configurations, monitoring, and change management.
Another roadmap item in the research stages is Mobile Server Manager for iOS mobile. The SMC Rest API was used to build the Oracle JET mobile application. Users will sign in to the mobile app using their existing Server Manager username and password. Once you’re in the app, you will be taken to a dashboard landing page that shows the overall health of the system. Users will be able to see failed, stopped, and running managed instances. You can also view a list that will logically group different types of servers (i.e. Enterprise, Deployment, Database, Web) and show if they are failed, stopped or running. The ability to start or stop a server will be shown next to the name of an individual server. In addition, instance details like name, status, runtime, etc. will be shown in the app. You can view a summary of the details and also see metrics of Java memory information.
Other planned enhancements include enhancements to system managing systems like:
- SM REST APIs that require an additional skillset
- Simplifying the adoption of Server Manager REST APIs
- Leveraging standard based Orchestration tools
- Enabling customers/partners to automate repetitive administration tasks
- Leveraging existing JDE skill sets for automation