The Compleat Idiot's Guide to PBCS, No. 3 -- Managing PBCS

Quid Novi PBCS

Never fear, that’s the last Latin you’ll see in this post.  But I will indeed be covering what’s new in the administration of the PBCS service.  There’s a lot of interesting information available.  Remember, this isn’t about managing your firm’s Planning application but instead managing the PBCS instance.

NB – We still haven’t gotten to PBCS itself and that is the very next post but managing the Cloud is important.  

A warning, this is a very picture heavy post as there’s an awful lot to see.  Dial up (are there any left?) users probably ought to go get a cup of coffee.  Or two.  Perhaps grinding the beans wouldn’t be a bad idea.  Roasting from green wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea either.  You get the idea.

One other thing – what I’m going to review isn’t what a user or even a Planning administrator would see but instead what Oracle calls the Service Administrator.  This person, whoever he is, manages the Cloud service(s) so this applies to more than just PBCS.

Oracle has a lot of Cloud offerings and they’re all managed through the Oracle Cloud My Services portal.

Wouldn’t this be nice?

It is.  As I’ve noted before, one of the things I like so much about PBCS is how Oracle bring useful information to the front instead of making you search through scads of documentation.

As an example, when I log in as a cloud administrator…

I see the below as I have my username set up to show this on login.

Do I want to know what the very latest and greatest about Cloud My Services (CMS)?  It’s right there staring me in the face.

Remember how I wrote about how great the PBCS documentation is?  It’s baked into the tool itself.  

Clicking on the Account Administrator (AA) link takes me to all of the tasks an AA does and then shows how to do them.

What’s new?

Want to know what the new CMS functionality is without searching through patches and ReadMes and all of the other stuff we need to do with on-premises tools?  Easy peasy.

NB – For you Frankie fans, that song (see the above section title link) is from one of his suicide albums.  Fun times.  Oracle Cloud doesn’t engender that feeling in me but rather the opposite.

Want to understand what all the pretty icons mean? Click away.

The Surrey with the Fringe on Top

Once I get past the help panel, the next thing I see is the status of my PBCS instance.

Another American Songbook note: Mel Torme sings “…the dashboard’s genuine leather…” in the song.  Sometimes my references are too obscure.

Back to reality, things are running well, thankfully.  Click on the Details button and I get, unsurprisingly, details.

I can take a longer view of the service status – here’s the past year.

Navigation takes me to my pod’s service outages and all kinds of other metrics.

I can even see the Cloud (not actually users within PBCS but) user accounts.

Users with FTP access:

PBCS user roles:

As well as contact and account management (there’s not much to see and even I weary of cut and paste).

Wot’ll she do, mister?

Concerned about how long it will take upload that humungous data file?  Here’s my totally lame-o fiber upload speed.  Not actually all that great.

What does this all mean?

I wanted to walk you all through this because I think it’s important to understand how Oracle gets you out of the infrastructure business and yet lets you keep track of everything that is infrastructure.  The information you need, the pain you don’t.  Is there anyone outside of infrastructure consultants who like infrastructure?  Not yr. obt. svt.  And I suspect not you.

As noted in the introduction the next post will finally, finally, finally touch PBCS itself.  I thought it was important for you to understand the underpinnings (documentation, Cloud management) behind the tool.

Be seeing you.