RE: Grid Control - opinions please
- From: "Bob Murching" <bob_murching@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx>, "'Jason Heinrich'" <jheinrich@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 11:04:13 -0400
What Grid Control facilitates is enterprise monitoring and reporting, the
broader question is, how important is that to you? In this future SOA world
that everyone is blindly rushing into, servers and databases are mere
components of an overarching application service that requires a somewhat
different kind of monitoring or reporting. Or so the argument goes. GC is
positioning itself to be the platform for providing that service-oriented
monitoring, reporting and [potentially] administration.
Particularly with R2 and the various BigIP/MSSQL/Cisco/NetApp monitoring
capabilities that are coming to light, Grid Control is trying to become less
of a DBA tool and more of an enterprise service management console of sorts.
Unfortunately, all that does is leave DBAs high and dry, while evolving OEM
into the sort of thing that Gartner praises but in reality adds little value
for many shops. Such is the way of IT, though. Accept it for what it is
and make the most use of what [little] it offers to DBAs... that's my
advice.
_____
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jared Still
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:44 AM
To: Jason Heinrich
Cc: Oracle-L Freelists
Subject: Re: Grid Control - opinions please
Comments below:
On 4/6/06, Jason Heinrich <jheinrich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
That said, things aren't all sunshine and roses. Running in a browser does
limit you to only working on one target at a time, though you could open
multiple browser tabs to get around this. Certain targets have a bad habit
of going into "Status pending" or "Metric collection error" status for no
apparent reason; and I'm having the same issue as Jeffrey Beckstrom, where
GC won't send me notification emails, even though everything appears to be
setup properly. Finally, I haven't found a way to display a list of
sessions on a database without using the Diagnostics Pack.
I can't help myself here, as there are now multiple complaints about the
notifications.
The Perl/shell/SQLPlus/PLSQL daemons and/or scripts run from cron
have for several years been monitoring databases that I am in responsible
for.
(Mostly Perl)
Among the things monitored:
* database uptime. during (configurable per each db) uptime hours, the
oncall DBA is paged if a database is unresponsive. If it happens during
non-critical hours, the page is delayed until a configurable number of
connection attempts have failed in succession. This avoids waking the
DBA up (me) if the problem corrects itself.
* space - email a report every morning with space issues. Objects
appear in the report if they do not have enough space to add
more extents (5 I think). Accounts for autoextend files.
* Windows services. Windows has the nasty habit of sometimes failing
to start a service on bootup. This could be a timeout issue, as there is
a lot happening at bootup. A Perl service on another windows box
checks certain remote services, restarts them if they are down and
pages the DBA.
* response time monitoring. No paging, just charts generated showing
average response times from the database perspective. Based on
Statspack and YAPP.
* alert log monitoring. check for errors in the alert.log. Which errors
to check and which to ignore is configurable via regex. Runs as a
daemon on linux/unix, and a service on Windows.
This has been in use and working with very few problems since 1998
on Unix, 2002 on Windows. It does work better on unix though.
No doubt many DBA's have reliable home grown scripts and processes
for monitoring and managing databases.
A GUI is no substitute for knowing how the database works.
The scripting approach has an advantage that OEM/GC or any other
tool has: you are not dependent on a vendo (Oracle or anyone else)
to fix or support their tool so you can do your job.
You can create tools to do exactly what you need. If your needs change
you can modify them. When they break, you can fix them.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading all this.
And perhaps you can understand the apprehension felt by many when attempting
to use some of the 'time saving' tools, and the reluctance to give up tried
and true methods.
--
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist
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