OEM CLI Commands for Bulk Property Changes

This will be a brief post, mostly so I can save this command somewhere besides the bash_history file on my OEM server. It may prove useful to a few others too… it has been absolutely essential for me on several occasions! (I was just using it again recently which reminded me to stick it in this blog post.) This is how you can make bulk property changes to a large group of targets in OEM:

(oracle)$ emcli login -username=jeremy
(oracle)$ emcli get_targets -noheader -script | sed \
  's/Metric Collection Error/MCE/;s/Under Blackout/Blackout/;s/Status Pending/Pending/' >targets

(oracle)$ less targets
(oracle)$ awk '{print$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8"~"$3"~Department~default"}' targets >inp

  or... awk '{print$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8"~"$3"~Line of Business~test"}' targets >inp
  or... awk '{print$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8"~"$3"~Location~chicago"}' targets >inp
  or... awk '{print$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8"~"$3"~LifeCycle Status~Production"}' targets >inp

(oracle)$ less inp
(oracle)$ emcli set_target_property_value -property_records=REC_FILE \
  -input_file=REC_FILE:inp -separator=property_records="\n" -subseparator=property_records=~

(oracle)$ emcli logout

Note that the property name is case-sensitive: “Lifecycle” won’t work but “LifeCycle” does. Also, the commands above are of course intended to be tinkered with. Use grep to filter out targets; search on any regular expression you can dream up.

This process is important here because we use Administration Groups to automatically propagate monitoring templates (with standardized metric thresholds for paging) to all of our OEM targets. There have been a number of times when I’ve needed to make bulk property changes and it takes a very long time to do that through the UI. These commands are much faster.