On April 23, 2025, OS Management reaches end of life (EOL). Effective now, the service is no longer available to you in regions where you are not already using OS Management, or to new users with new tenancies. Before the EOL date, we recommend that you migrate your managed instances to the OS Management Hub service. For more information, see the Service Change Announcement.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OS Management service allows you to manage and monitor
updates and patches for the operating system environments on your Oracle Cloud instances,
including instances managed by the OS Management
Oracle Autonomous Linux service. OS Management also
provides options for discovering and monitoring resources on your instances.
OS Management Components and Features
Review the following components and features to help you get started with OS Management.
Managed Instance
A Compute instance that uses the OS Management
service is referred to as a managed instance.
Managed Instance Groups
Managed instance groups enable you to group your instances together for
updates.
OS Management uses the OS Management Service Agent
plugin for managing and applying updates. The Oracle Cloud Agent manages the OS Management Service Agent plugin.
For more information about the Oracle Cloud Agent, see
Managing Plugins with Oracle Cloud
Agent.
The OS Management Service Agent plugin provides the necessary permissions to
apply updates on managed instances:
For Oracle Linux instances, the OS Management Service Agent plugin utilizes the standard Linux permissions for a sudo administrative
account to apply updates.
For Windows instances, the OS Management Service Agent plugin creates a virtual service account for
applying updates on the instance. The virtual service account is
OCAOSMS. Do not remove this account on instances where the
OS Management service is used.
For Linux instances, OS Management provides a search facility that you can
use to check individual packages. Using this search facility, you can check
for available updates. You can also use this facility to perform actions for
managing Linux packages, such as installing, removing, and updating packages
on managed instances and managed instance groups.
For Linux instances, OS Management provides a search facility that you can
use to check individual CVEs. This facility helps you determine the level of
exposure in your tenancy.
Resource Discovery and Monitoring allows auto-discovery and basic monitoring
of resources running on Oracle Linux Compute instances managed by the OS
Management service.
When you use the OS Management service to manage
updates on a managed instance or managed instance group, you have full
control over when actions take place. If you specify that an action take
place at a particular date and time, the OS Management service creates a scheduled job. OS Management provides two basic modes for scheduled
jobs: one-time and recurring jobs.
OS Management actions such as installing, removing,
or updating packages are asynchronous and initiate work requests. You can
use the work request to track the status of operations, including the
ability to see why an action failed.
OS Management periodically removes managed instances from the service that haven't communicated with the OS Management service in the last 30 days.
Note
Orphaned OS Management resource objects in a tenancy are reclaimed after 90 days. For example:
Recurring scheduled jobs assigned to a group with no instances for 90 days.
Scheduled jobs assigned to an instance that's inactive for 90 days.
Groups with no attached instances for 90 days.
Custom software sources with no instances attached for 90 days.
Availability π
The OS Management service is available in all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure commercial regions. See About Regions and Availability Domains for the
list of available regions, along with
associated locations, region identifiers, region keys, and availability domains.
Resource Identifiers π
Most types of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources have a unique, Oracle-assigned identifier called an Oracle Cloud ID (OCID). For information about the OCID format and other ways to identify your resources, see Resource Identifiers.
Authorization and Authentication π
Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication
and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK or CLI, and REST API).
An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups, compartments,
and policies that control which users can access which services, which resources,
and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users,
create and manage the cloud network, launch instances, create buckets, download objects,
etc. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies.
For details about writing policies for other services, see Policy Reference.
If youβre a regular user (not an administrator) who needs to use the Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure resources that your company owns, contact your administrator to set
up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or
compartments you should be using.
Creating Automation with Events π
You can create automation based on state changes for your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
resources by using event types, rules, and actions. For more information, see Overview of Events. For reference
information about OS Management events, see OS Management Events.
OS Management resources that emit events:
Managed instances
Managed instance groups
Scheduled jobs
Software sources
Ways to Access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure π
You can access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using the Console (a browser-based interface)
or the REST API. Instructions for the Console and API
are included in topics throughout this guide. For a list of available SDKs, see Software Development Kits and Command Line
Interface.
To access the Console, you must use a supported browser. To go to the Console
sign-in page, open the navigation menu at the top of this page and click Infrastructure
Console. You prompted to enter your cloud tenant, your user name, and your password.
For general information about using the API, see REST APIs.