Re: Database Monitoring Tool

In my opinion, all these things are overrated, but these two are weak - even in this field. (Based on evaluations of DB-Vision in late 1998 and recent evaluation of OEM tuning & diagnostics pack.)

DB-Vision just dumps every possible statistic from the data dictionary to a graph. It has no real intelligence and the UI is, well, rather primitive - imagine windows explorer with yet another set of graphs at every [+]. I have used this off-and-on for four years, but never found it that useful.

IMHO - OEM needs to go a long ways to catch up with the competition... It seems that each of these two PAKs has one useful tool.

I have heard good things about BMC Patrol and some of Quest's tools, but have no firsthand experience with their "monitoring" tools.

It depends on what you are looking for, but I like Savant's Q-Diagnostics. It has an extremely good and unique interface, but all the drill-downs are still essentialy text reports. Q is definitely a diagnostics tool (including performance diagnostics). It is not a long-term monitoring tool (aka DB-Vision). If you want

What do you want to do with it? Please be specific. Some "monitoring" tools try to pass themselves off as diagnostic tools and vica-versa. Some are strong on long term statistics gathering and graphing. Others (Q, for example), are strong on diagnostics, but don't even pretend to be long-term "monitoring" tools.

The biggest mistake you can make is just buying a "monitoring" tool just because:

1. The boss thought you needed one... without a specific case. or
2. You don't know how to do it the "hard" way

The cheapest, most reliable, least-intrusive, educational, and flexible way to do database monitoring is via SQL, PL/SQL, and good old /bin/ksh (or Perl) scripts. But if you're doing analysis of I/O patterns over time, it can be quite tiresome to read all that text! Another downside/upside, depending on your perspective, is that you need an intimate knowledge of the data dictionary.

In article <3809E1F2.966FB5FB_at_columbus.rr.com>, Archana Prasad <archana_at_columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am in the process of evaluating Platinum tools (DB Vision) and Oracle
>Tools (Oracle Enterprise Manager) for performance monitoring and
>alerting. Does anyone have any good/bad experiences or a comparative
>study of these tools. Please advise if there are any other tools that
>serve the purpose as well.
>
>Thanks,
>Archana.

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