RE: Oracle Free Monitoring link

Yeah I would not consider Quest Spotlight a "monitoring" tool. Meaning you can't go home and have Spotlight warn/alert you about free space...or locks. It is for "active monitoring"...active diagnostics much in the way a DBA would actively (not constantly) query v$session, etc. It puts "face" on the Oracle database.
Spotlight does a great job of pointing you in the right direction when you already know *something* is wrong...not telling you something is wrong ahead of time. Spotlight is to much of a client PC hog to run it for more than several databases for a log time.

Regarding "face"...the GUI itself. I have not seen the 10g "Dashboard", but I have a hard time, based on past experience believing that OEM has a better, more intuitive, and compete GUI than OEM. Am I wrong?...is OEM 10g GUI that good...that changed. I did hear the Oracle hired away many Quest Developers?

Chris Marquez
Oracle DBA

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org on behalf of Pakhutkin, Maxim (Max) Sent: Fri 7/15/2005 1:41 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Oracle Free Monitoring link  

10g Grid Control (OEM) won't connect to a pre-8i database (at least for me): Failed to connect to database: ORA-03134: Connections to this server version are no longer supported. (DBD ERROR: OCISessionBegin). http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showDocument?p_database_id=NOT <http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/ml2_documents.showDocument?p_database_id=NOT&p_id=297437.1> &p_id=297437.1 "unfeasible to fix"  

Personally I haven't had any major trouble with 10.1.0.4 Grid Control monitoring 129 targets (82 of them are databases, only 2 are pre-8i) yet. I wouldn't characterize it the way Rich did, at this point. Certainly less resource-intensive than Spotlight, from my experience. There are a few bugs that I've encountered, but they were not major, except for occasional deadlocks. Nothing so far that would prevent us from using it in production in addition to our current 3 monitoring scripts (can't beat the reliability of a simple dbms_job script). Test reorgs via OEM had some glitches, but I would never trust a tool to do something like that for me anyway, was just curious how it did it. Plus we almost never do reorgs here.  

Generally I'm very impressed with the tool. Very sound design. Can't really compare with any one of Quest tools on an equal basis though, as OEM covers so much more than any one individual Quest tool. We have licensed the whole Quest suite here, but are considering stopping paying for support and upgrades, which is why we deployed OEM in test. Some of the DBAs here haven't touched a Quest tool (other than Toad) in months now.  

Basically, if you know your databases well, you don't need a monitoring tool, in my opinion, only basic homegrown "is it up or down?", "any errors in the alert log?" and "how are we doing on space?" scripts. Which is what we use here in production for monitoring. OEM just gives a nice centralized view of all the monitoring targets, with some quite relevant data collected. I find the performance monitoring features of OEM generally more useful than Spotlight's. The repository is not too greedy on space: with default metric collection settings and 129 targets the repository has stabilized at 3G in size. I don't expect having to bring the thing down for maintenance more often than once a quarter.  

Of course, the more databases you have to monitor, the higher the payoff of deploying OEM. If I only had 10 monitoring targets to monitor I would probably be less impressed or more frustrated with OEM.  

Max Pakhutkin  

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of Jesse, Rich Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 12:20 PM
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Oracle Free Monitoring link

Unreliable, unstable, resource intensive, very difficult to install and maintain (OEM 10g Grid Control), lesser level of support via MetaLink (my observation)...  

Need I go on as to why not OEM?  

I do use Spotlight occasionally and I like it, but I don't think it's necessarily a good tool to have running all the time, depending on your DBs. There's also a free version of the web-based Big Brother (now also owned by Quest) available at http://bb4.org , but I haven't used it in a while.  

And if I ever get back to writing my Perl/tk Oracle monitor, now defunct for over a year, there'll be another... ;)  

Rich

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of rjamya Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 10:29 AM
To: smishra_97_at_yahoo.com
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Oracle Free Monitoring link

TORA for linux ... it is basic but free ... why not OEM?  

Raj  

On 7/15/05, Sanjay Mishra < smishra_97_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

HI  

I am looking for any tool that can be used to provide some graphical output for Oracle monitoring. Is there any URL where I can download and configure to monitor some of the Oracle / other database which can provide graphical interface.  

Thanks

Sanjay

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l