Enterprise Manager Friday Tip- Management Packs and Annotations

Licensing can be a confusing topic for many, but additional stress can be felt for those that use tools that cover multiple products and features that can span more than one management pack.

I’ve demonstrated how you can see what management packs are used and how to control this via EM13c, (also available in EM12c) but that can take you away from the task at hand. That’s where turning on Annotations for Management Packs may be beneficial.

Annotations

What are annotations and why use them?

For Enterprise Manager 13c, this results in initials for management packs placed after feature drop down menus throughout the interface.

Enabling Annotations

Turning this feature on is very easy. Click on Settings, Management Pack and then Annotations.

Once this is enabled, your drop down menus will look a little different than they did previously, as the annotations will be added for the management pack(s) used by the feature. This is for both the upper right hand drop down from Enterprise to Settings and then the lower left menu, from the main Target Type and across.

To give an example, lets say we’ve logged into a database target and clicked on Performance. We’d now see the annotations for the management packs used for first section of options:

We quickly recognize the Database Diagnostics, (DD) and Database Tuning, (DT) Pack annotations next to each of the features.

Mission Impossible Quiz

Let’s take one of the drop downs from the Enterprise Menu with the annotations turned on. From Enterprise, Configuration, can you tell what management packs are being used outside of DBLM, (Database Lifecycle Management) in the list below?

There’s a lot of acronyms and initials there and hint, hint… I already showed you how to find out this information earlier, so take your time, I’ll wait right here….