Monitoring OAM Environment

Introduction

Security systems, including OAM, reside in a dynamic environment where the parameters that affect system performance are ever changing. On top of that, access management Infrastructure like OAM serve as the front door or gate to every application/system in an organization. Therefore continuous monitoring of such key components is mandatory to ensure continuous success of not just your access and SSO solution but indeed your very applications themselves. Effective monitoring involves two types of controls; preventive monitoring and detective monitoring. Preventive monitoring makes sure failure does not take place and detective monitoring helps you detect any failure if it occurred and take corrective measures. OAM has features to facilitate both the types of monitoring. We will go over all the monitoring capabilities offered by the product.

OIM Access Policy Harvesting

OIM R2 PS2 delivers a long time expected functionality: access policy harvesting. This new feature adds more flexibility to OIM access policies usage.

This is another post in the Oracle Identity Manager Academy from the Fusion Security Blog. for the entire post list click here.

Implementing a Custom Landing Page in OIM

Some of our OIM customers have a use-case of implementing a custom landing page. Such a landing page could be used for multiple purposes, for example – to display some static information like guidelines for using the system or dynamic information like system news, new features, releases etc.
OIM 11gR2 PS2 provides a convenient way of implementing this use-case and it is the subject of this post.

Part 2: Custom Login and Logout with Detached Credential Collector (DCC)

INTRODUCTION

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available. In Part 1: Getting under the covers of Detached Credential Collector (DCC), I spent time talking about DCC in general and walked through a sequence diagram explaining what is happening with DCC, to try and explain how it works including contrasting it with ECC. So in this blog, Part 2, I want to expand into a more practical angle on the requirements of a totally custom login and logout. Creating a custom login and logout does not require the Perl scripts login.pl or logout.pl, though these are perfectly great options and can also be customized. If you do want to take the route of using the OAM out-of-the-box Perl scripts you can find more information about it and its implementation in the Oracle Developer Guide for OAM 11g (11.1.2) in section 4.4 Developing User the Detached Credential Collector or see Debasish Bhattacharya’s blog article Detached Credential Collector Configuration --- OAM 11gR2. Moving forward, and as promised, I am going to guide you on how to create a totally custom login and logout using DCC without requiring any hardcore developer skills --- I promise.

OAM Post Authentication operation

Since OAM 10g days, keeping track of Protected Resource that user wanted to access throughout custom authentication process has been a challenge. In OAM 10g, it was possible to create custom OBFormLoginCookie to overcome that challenge. With the introduction of Encrypted OAM_REQ cookie in OAM 11g, it is not feasible. That makes it difficult to do post Authentication operations or any customizations in Authentication process.

OAM 11gR2 introduced a feature where you can redirect user to a URL post successful Authentication (On Authentication success event in Authentication policy as defined in the screen shot below). OAM while doing that redirect, adds end_url query parameter to URL with the value of protected resource that user tried to access. You can do any post Authentication processing required on Authentication success URL and then redirect user to end_url.