Re: Monitoring software

From: Kellyn Pedersen <kjped1313_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:31:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <431709.74117.qm_at_web120204.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>



In complete agreement with Kyle-  I make sure my developers have all the access to the dictionary/performance views they need to do their jobs efficiently and send every query I use along with findings so they can work the problem out for themselves in the future...  Keeping this kind of information to just the DBA's is foolish when the developers are the ones who really need to know what's going on under the covers BEFORE it goes to production... :)

Kellyn Pedersen
Sr. Database Administrator
I-Behavior Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kellynpedersen www.dbakevlar.blogspot.com
 
"Go away before I replace you with a very small and efficient shell script..."

  • On Tue, 6/22/10, kyle Hailey <kylelf_at_gmail.com> wrote:

From: kyle Hailey <kylelf_at_gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Monitoring software
To: Richard.Goulet_at_parexel.com
Cc: Jon.Crisler_at_usi.com, dgardella_at_gmail.com, development_at_the-playground.de, oracle-l_at_freelists.org Date: Tuesday, June 22, 2010, 2:30 PM

OK, now that someone said the key work, "developers", I'll throw in my biased 2 cents. The tool I'm working on DB Optimizer is targeted specifically at developers. It has no install, no agents, just log in and start monitoring. All you need is select on a few views like v$session  and you get the same kind of easy to understand graphics as OEM , ie  load graph and drill downs, though faster and finer grain, than OEM and the overhead is negligible (less than 1% of 1 CPU generally)

My experience is that developers are left out in the dark on database performance which is quite a shame since they are the ones writing the code that puts the load on the database. As a database administrator I was constantly getting blamed for bad performance by app developers and mainly because the app developers had no view into the actual performance of the database. With DB Optimizer they can see for themselves clearly and easily and if there is anything they don't understand they can show me (or the dba) the report and then we have something to talk about (instead of blaming and finger pointing)

DB Optimizer has other features such as a full IDE for SQL with type ahead, syntax checking, templates etc plus  load testing and SQL tuning. The SQL tuning isn't monitoring but is the part I'm finding the most interesting and innovative.

Two recent links  on my blog show the two most interesting features. The visual SQL tuning http://db-optimizer.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonathan-lewis-webinar-replay.html and the load profiling
http://db-optimizer.blogspot.com/2010/06/cursorsharing-picture-is-worth-1000.html The last link is interesting because I one point I had to get into an argument with a super smart coder (had actually worked on the Cray back in the day) who didn't want to use bind variables in his code, so it was nice to be able to show him the impact graphically of not using bind variables. Graphics just speak louder than words.

Best Wishes
Kyle Hailey

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Goulet, Richard <Richard.Goulet_at_parexel.com> wrote:

OH heck, I guess I'll put in my two cents as well.  The question that you need to answer before selecting software is what are you trying to monitor, for what audience, and what privileges in the database will they require.  For us Grid Control is the monitoring software of choice for the database management group, but that leaves our developers and managers out in the cold since we don't want to grant them any privileges, especially in production.  Basically for them we want a look, but no touch system.  That was not something that I could find on the open source or other markets, so I built my own based on what the developers and managers needed.  Yes it's very niche in it's functionality, but they love it.  It has zero impact on the databases, does not maintain a connection, does not expose any app data (auditors really like the fact that the account it's logged into can only see the data dictionary), and being done in PHP is very easy to  maintain.  For us, subject closed.
 
Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Lead
PAREXEL International
 

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Crisler, Jon Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:35 PM
To: dgardella_at_gmail.com; development_at_the-playground.de Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Monitoring software

I would recommend Zenoss – one thing about this package is that some of the key developers on the database agent side I know personally, and they have experience deploying this to monitor DB servers numbering in the thousands.  Zenoss scales to very large numbers of servers when others tend to fall flat.   

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Received on Tue Jun 22 2010 - 17:31:48 CDT

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