Oracle Corp. is strengthening its offerings for monitoring and management automation in the hybrid cloud.

The company announced the newest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager in late April. The latest version – 13c, Release 5 – is designed to create a unified management center for businesses seeking one set of tools for running IT operations on-premises or in the cloud.

The firm’s update of Enterprise Manager represents yet another installment in Oracle’s drive to address inefficiencies between the cloud and locally hosted software by connecting key elements in both platforms together.

“We try to make the experience of Enterprise Manager to be very similar with how people work with a cloud service,” said Wim Coekaerts (pictured), senior vice president of software development at Oracle. “We can connect all the dots. It’s an integration with the entire cloud platform that’s really happening now.”

Coekaerts spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed new features in the latest release designed to help with database monitoring, the role of automation tools for cloud migration, baking in compliance and security standards, and a faster MySQL-based query solution recently introduced by Oracle.

Improving extensibility and management

Coekaerts noted two specific features in the Enterprise Manager release that illustrated how Oracle has sought to connect the hybrid dots. The company has made improvements in extensibility by employing REST APIs, so the service can now be implemented from third-party automation tools such as Ansible.

In addition, Oracle recently added a Grafana plugin for Enterprise Manager. Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring solution for databases and can be used to support management operations.

“We provide a plugin that allows customers to have a Grafana dashboard where the data comes out of Enterprise Manager,” Coekaerts explained. “That allows us to integrate Enterprise Manager into a cloud environment.”

By providing greater integration of its on-premises operations tools into cloud platforms, Oracle is providing a bridge for organizations looking to migrate key databases from on-premises to the cloud. Automation plays a key role in this scenario, which is akin to refueling an airplane in mid-air.

“You can migrate 10 databases or 50 databases and it will work; it’s all automated out of the box,” Coekaerts said. “Your existing database is running, and we can do a logical backup and restore, so while transactions are happening, we’re still migrating it over. Then when you do a cut off, it makes the transition a lot easier.”

Ensuring security

Automation plays an important role in security for Oracle’s Enterprise Manager solution as well. Companies must ensure that certain datasets meet compliance standards, such as those applied to Payment Card Industry or healthcare data.

“From how we run a database inside our own world, we’ve learned about that over the years, and we’ve baked that knowledge into Enterprise Manager,” Coekaerts said. “We push a button and we validate the policies in those files and we make sure the database is compliant to that. We take all of that manual work out of the picture.”

Oracle has also taken steps in recent months to enhance the database query process. The company introduced HeatWave last year, a massively parallel query accelerator for MySQL.

“It really accelerates MySQL usage by 100x,” Coekaerts noted. “It does in-memory operations and, blazingly fast, returns it to you. The nice thing is it turns every MySQL database into a data warehouse without any change whatsoever in your application.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE