We had a Virtual-DBA customer request that we install and configure a new Grid Control agent on a new server with existing databases. While there are several ways to do this, we wanted the customer to be able to perform this task by themselves in the future.
The method we chose to use was to deploy the agent from Enterprise Manager. The process of adding a new agent can be complex and difficult sometimes, but this procedure is fairly straight forward.
We logged into the server hosting Grid Control and ensured that the agent we would be deploying was available for the platform we were deploying. We were deploying to Linux so we navigated to $OMS_HOME/sysman/agent_download. Here you will see versions of the agent currently available on the server and under the versions there will be the platform specific agent files. So if you wanted to install a windows agent and it wasn’t available on your Grid Control server you would download it from Oracle or Oracle Support and place it in this location.
Next we logged into both servers and made sure we were able to SSH to the target and from the target to the Grid Control server. If SSH isn’t already setup between Oracle Management Server (OMS) and the target the deployment wizard will try to set it up by creating keys, but we have had issues with this in the past so we choose to test and set it up ourselves if there are any issues.
Our host was in a different domain so we edited our host files on both the target server and Grid Control server to add both fully qualified host names and IP address as our client isn’t using DNS for their Linux servers. For safe measure we also added entries to the TNSNAMES.ORA file on the Grid Control server to ensure we could tnsping the databases that were to be added to Grid Control.
With that little bit of setup we were then ready to log into Enterprise Manager and begin the deployment by clicking on the deployment tab from the home page once logged in. We then selected ‘Install Agent’ on the next page. We did a fresh install so we selected ‘Fresh Install’.
On the next page we selected the default Source Shiphome Directory as we verified in the beginning that the agent we wanted to install was indeed available via Grid Control server. We selected our agent and our platform versions from the dropdown boxes. We then provided our list of hosts that were to have the agent installed. We made sure to only put hostnames here and not IP addresses. We then entered in our host credentials and base installation directory that we wanted the agent to be installed on the target server. We left the default port as that’s what they were already using. With the information filled it we were able to then click next and let the automated process finish the agent install. After the agent install we were able to look and manage the new hosts and databases from our Enterprise Manager console.