RE: DBA's are Duhvelopers Too!!! - was Centralized Alert Log Moni

Steve,

"Any plans to publish and collaborate development in a forum like SourceForge?"

Isn't that what TOra is all about?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tora

Mark

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 08 January 2002 15:46
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

...DBA tools written in Python? Hey that was my idea! :-)

Python is great!!! We have a ton of operational Python scripts to support application administration and all the data is stored in Oracle. I've piggy-backed on the development efforts of other Python newbies and the code is quite readable... in stark contrast to newbie Perl code!

I've developed DBA tools and monitoring stuff in PHP and Perl but now I'm entertaining a redo and consolidation into Python with RRDTool graphing.
(I'm still anxiously awaiting Jared's book with TONS of Perl!! :-) Regarding
drivers, do you use cxOracle or DCOracle? Database access with Perl is more mature. I like PHP because it's SO GOOD (and easy) for generating web pages but I haven't found Python/HTML integration to be as good. Have you used the Zope stuff? I'm thinking Zope will help for HTML/XML integration but it seems like overhead and too much of a learning curve. Nevertheless, the object orientation of Python/Zope should help once you learn it.

Any plans to publish and collaborate development in a forum like SourceForge? I'm thinking the collaborative development efforts of folks in the DBA community could produce something better than current commercial offerings (especially Oracle's OEM) and the resulting tool set would be extensible, customizable and FREE. Is anyone interested in this?

DBA's are Duhvelopers too!

Steve Orr,
Bozeman, Montana

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 7:10 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

I'm working on a complete monitoring system written in Python. I made a list
of all the things I want to check for and am working my way through the list

as I find time. I chose Python because I really enjoy programming in the language and find that it does everything I need with few issues. I chose this project to work on because I needed to improve our system of db monitoring here and found the commercial products lacking and/or just too expensive to justify. Having a project which allows me to hone my Python programming skills is also nice. Eventually, I may bring the various scripts
together to update a central server where a web interface will show immediately the condition of the various systems. That combined with email alerts would meet most if not all my needs.

Right now, I have several utilities written which email warnings about potential database problems.

One utility scans all the alert logs for the database instances on the server. Every 15 minutes, it checks the file mod time against the current time. If the file changed within the last 15 minutes, I open the file and readlines checking the timestamp tags in the file. When it find the tag from
the latest entry, it writes that line and the remainder of the alert log file
to a mail message which gets sent to me.

I had a daemon process running that looked for changes in the file size, but

I didn't have a good mechanism for guaranteeing that the daemon was always running other than using a cron job to check and restart it if necessary. In
which case I had to have logic to correctly pick up where it last quit. That
proved too much trouble, so I decided to set it up to run as a cron job and thought file mod times gave me the best way to check for changes. Something

tells me that the timestamp in the file may not get updated for every alert log update, so I may have to work on another way for parsing the file to find
the latest entries.

Another utility program scans the dump directories looking for new files. When one is found, email gets sent to me with the file name and the first 25

lines of the file.

Glenn Stauffer

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Author: Mark Leith
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