Re: Routine Checks

Morning Niall,

>> As some of you will have picked up I am in a relatively new
position.
Nope, didn't notice :o)

>> One of the things sadly lacking is any sort of pro-active monitoring
routine.
Par for the course then ?

<SNIP>

We use HP's Open View monitoring system as our official paid for monitor. We in the database team (rebels that we are !) also back this up with the better and easier Nagios (free) tool. It gives a better overview screen in any browser from any PC than the Open View Java abomination - which must be installed locally where you wish to use it.

The tests we do every hour are :

Is the database up?

Is the listener up?

Tablespace usage (warn at 80%, go critical at 90% - unless we have a gig of free space left. (an interesting script to write - I had to take into account autoextend datafiles, max sizes, tablespaces with both non-extendable and auto-extendabe, LMT and DMT differences and so on. and is it TEMP (ie CONTENTS - TEMPORARTY or in DBA_TEMP_FILEs - Nightmare !)

Cannot allocate a next extent due to free space being insufficient (DMT and LMT taken into consideration).

Broken Jobs.

Still running in hot backup mode.

A few specific checks for various applications.

Alert log monitoring is done by Open View as is listener.log monitoring.

(Our Nagios guru is against having 'agents' on the servers as they only tell you thet the agent is running, not the app or database itself, a failing in Open View !)

We also check our WebLogic systems, HTTP servers, firewall etc etc.

In addition, I have recently been given the go ahead to perform various checks on 'my' databases to ensure a decent level of health - I have a 30 odd page document outlining the chacks I will be doing (EA specific) but these include :

• database parameters
• username/passwords in use (defaults, hard coding etc)
• code review (where code in the database)
• invalid objects
• auditing etc.

>> A related question is how many of you are using, specifically, 10gR2
EM to
>> automate these sorts of things. We have a pretty dire EM10gR1
implementation
>> that I wish to redo and 10gR2 looks an order of magnitude better
than R1,
>> but any gotchas - like it doesn't work - would be nice to know ahead
of
>> time.

Not yet, but I've heard a rhumour that it will be coming as we standardise on 10gR2. We shall see.

Good luck!

Cheerns,
Norman.

Norman Dunbar.
Contract Oracle DBA.
Rivers House, Leeds.

Internal : 7 28 2051
External : 0113 231 2051

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