Re: DBA Monitoring Tools

In article <Cow1AI.MI_at_cscns.com>, Tim Cannon <tcannon_at_cscns.com> wrote:
>Hey, fellow DBAs .... I'm currently looking at a demo package of dbVision
>software, a GUI based series of Oracle DBA/performance/space monitoring
>tools. Is there anyone out here in netland that has any practical
>experience with this or any of the other related packages (Patrol, etc?)?

This is probably a topic of wide enough interest to discuss on-line. I have just finished trial of Patrol 1.3.23. I start the trial of EcoTools on May 11th. We are planning to try the Patrol version 2 product in mid-

Patrol v1 uses shell scripts for most of its work. Thus, if you can program shell, you can customize/extend. There is, of course, some overhead in using shells. Further, it is not a product that you just pop out of the box and "zing", it is working. Reminds me of mainframe software: installing it is only the beginning; customizing is the real work. I felt that the update interval was, in general, too long. I shortened it to what felt like a more reasonable interval (ie. checking for space problems every 5 minutes instead of hourly) and in the end, the Patrol product was using more system time/resources than I would like. Keep in mind that we were running Patrol with the Oracle7, Oracle Financials, Accounting, and SQL*NET7 modules. It ran on HP 9.04, the same machine as the databases reside. We did not test the ability to remotely monitor multiple machines/databases.

We did have a couple of snags: clicking on the gagues to maximize them caused Patrol to core-dump. Patrol T/S says this is related to the HP9000/800 archetecture, that the product was compiled for 9000/700 hardware, and that it is fixed in the next release. Also, we saw a problem about 4 times where the backend PatrolServer process would disconnect from the frontend, and spin, consuming all available CPU. (sounds like a problem posted recently on this net regarding orasrv doing the same thing.)

My $0.02, so far.

Anyone else care to share experiences?

--
Lynn Osburn 
losburn_at_pace.com 
REAL men don't use porn.