As Dick says, it's important what you are monitoring and why and for whom. I work for one of those remote managed services companies that provides monitoring across the globe across enterprises. Most of these tools are great when you are inside the firewall next to the db server. Try to report outside a firewall with any of them and they generally fall flat because the security folks either won't open that port or won't let that data out. We had to roll our own if you will and use basic services such as sqlplus, mailx, ftp, scp to monitor. It's not pretty, but what it produces is. Just another thought, John ________________________________ From: "Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx; dgardella@xxxxxxxxx; development@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tue, June 22, 2010 2:47:26 PM Subject: RE: Monitoring software 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Crisler, Jon Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:35 PM To: dgardella@xxxxxxxxx; development@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 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.