Author: Courtney Llamas

Kids and LEGO and Robotics, Oh My!

Kids and LEGO and Robotics, Oh My!

If you know me well,  you know Oracle is my secondary passion.  My true passion is my children.  I have two amazing, beautiful, intelligent and active boys, ages 7 and 9 (no bias there, I know).   Life is never dull, that’s for sure!  We are fortunate to live in a area with great schools, with teachers and administration that realize the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education.   We have a very active PTO that goes to amazing efforts to raise money so that the school can get the latest technology and programs to help our kids succeed.   The whole school participates in the Hour of Code each year, and recently started a Python programming club.  Kids actually come to school early to program!  They also recently added robotics teams for 1st-6th, and this year my 4th and 1st grader are both participating.

I didn’t know much about the FIRST organization before now.  They’ve done some Jr. Engineering and Jr. Robotics camps, most recently an excellent one by Woodlands Robotics that they really enjoyed.  This led to their interest in participating with the school teams.  My oldest is in FIRST LEGO League (FLL), where my youngest is doing FIRST LEGO League Jr for kids K-3rd grade.   Last weekend the FLL team had their first competition, and there’s only really one way to describe it.  Electric.

FIRST LEGO League (FLL)

This program is for students in 4-8th grade.  Each year there’s a new challenge.   This year it’s about trash, and how we can reduce, reuse and recycle.   The teams have missions they have to solve with their robot, all worth a certain number of points. They need to work together to decide the best use of their time, and how to program the robot to complete as many missions as possible in 2 1/2 minutes.

They are also judged on their core values (discovery, teamwork, gracious professionalism), robot design, and their project.  The project is a way for them to show their creativity in how to solve this years challenge.   Our team decided that our school could reduce trash by using sporks instead of spoons and forks, and recycling in the cafeteria.  The also wrote a rap and performed this for the judges.   The team has a sponsor, but all the work is done by the kids themselves.

For the robot, they use the LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robot.  If you haven’t checked this out, you should.   Every techie could fall in love with this.  You can build various robot models, with sensors and arms.  Then you connect it to your computer and program using a visual block structure.   Viola! You’ve got a robot that can play music, move pieces, turn wheels and anything else you can think of!  The programming is very flexible, and easy enough once you understand what the components do.

Competition Day

Our team is called 4G Short Circuits.  These 6 boys and 1 girl have been meeting 4 hours a week after school since early October.  They stepped it up in the last 2-3 weeks adding every day before school for 45 minutes, working through lunch, and extra after school hours.   For a while I was a little concerned with how much time he was having to spend on this, he is only 9 after all.   With 7 incredibly intelligent kids, one of the things they’re learning  is to work together as a team, and communicate effectively.  When everybody has a great idea, it’s sometimes hard to get them all out for discussion.   Once they work out the kinks here, I think we can expect to see amazing things!  I know adults who have a hard time with this concept, so it’s exciting to see the kids working on it so young.

We arrived at the competition before 8am on a Saturday.  The kids got in a few practice rounds, some hands on experience and advice from the judges, and had a chance to fine tune their programs a bit.  It was amazing to see them just go to work and know exactly what they needed to do.   Then the kids go in front of a panel of judges for design, project and core values.

Solving problems after first test run.

Finally, the robot games started.  There’s three rounds and they keep their highest score.  Their first round, things didn’t go so well.  The robot went crooked, missed it’s mark, and stalled.  You could see the disappointment on their faces.  However when the scores were posted, they were still positive and went straight to work on fixing the problems they had.  They went into the second round knowing that their final program wasn’t quite right but they’d made some changes and hoped for the best.   When they hit 4 out of 5 missions, you could see the pure joy and accomplishment in their faces, and when they were ranked in the top 10, they were beyond themselves!   The third round didn’t go as well, and they slipped to 11th place, but these kids remained positive and upbeat the whole time, and that is what I’m so proud of.  Their first time as a team, first robotics competition and they came in 11th out of 42 teams!

Testing out their robot before competition starts.

They worked so hard to get to this point, just like any sports team when playing a tournament.   Although they didn’t win an award, they did earn their golden ticket to the regional competition in February.    These 4th graders worked together, worked hard, challenged themselves in areas they weren’t familiar with, and kept pushing until the very end.  They never game up, never game in.  They were electric.  And as a parent in tech, it was so exciting to see the sparks!  They’ve got a break for now, but in January they’ll be back in the lab working together to fix those problems and see how many more points they can earn for the next competition!

4G Short Circuits celebrating their golden ticket

One thing about the competition that stood out, was how diverse the participants were.  All ages, races, genders, it was really fun to see so many of the young girls involved with the robotics and programming.   The idea behind FIRST was a way to get more kids interested in STEM, by leveraging the sports competition model.  I think it’s working!  I think back to what I was doing in 4th grade, and it sure doesn’t compare to this!

Texas Torque is the high school team who sponsors the FLL competition for our district.  I have to say, this was the nicest group of high school kids I’ve ever met.   They won the FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in 2013 and were featured in the documentary Roboleague.   It’s an amazing look at how the FIRST league got started, and how bright and amazing these kids are.   So, if you have bright, creative, talented children who like to use their mind, check out FIRSTInspires.org and see if there’s an event in your area, or consider forming a team!

See my Kids & Code page for more resources!

All About That Agent…

For Enterprise Manager, the Agent plays a big role.  The Agent is in charge of gathering all information from the targets and performing administrative tasks and jobs.  To do it’s job, the Agent has to be healthy.  In this post, we’re going to take a look at some checks that you can perform to make sure that your Agents and Targets are monitored and reporting properly.

Agent Page

Let’s take a look at what we can find in the Agents page.   In my opinion, this is a page the main EM Administrator should be checking every day.  They should know what targets aren’t uploading, what Agents are down or have been blacked out for months.  From Setup / Manage Cloud Control / Agents we get the view below:

agents

First we have the ability to filter our view by Status.   We can view All, Up, Down, Blackout or Unreachable.  We can also look for agents that are Blocked or Misconfigured.  agents2

Agents are secured during install by default, so if there’s any No’s in the Secure Upload column, they should be resecured.

agents4

There are various statuses that you’ll find here.  The most common needing investigation will be Unreachable or Blocked.

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Unreachable agents will have an additional icon for Diagnostic Analysis.  This will run some checks to help determine why an agent is unreachable.

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The Last Successful Load can tell us a lot about an agent and it’s targets.   If you sort by this column, and find agents that haven’t uploaded for months or maybe even years, it’s a sign that nobody’s paying attention, and possibly that the target has been decommissioned.  If you can’t find a contact for these, then maybe a blackout is in order.agents6

I think the next two columns get overlooked often.

agents3

The first is monitored targets.  This is telling us how many targets (including host and agent) are being managed.  Now, every agent will have 3 at a minimum (agent, host, agent Oracle Home).  So if you see agents that have 2 or 3, that’s a big clue to start investigating just what are you monitoring on that server.  Is it new, or has it been decommissioned and not cleaned up properly?   The Broken Targets column is another key to diagnosing issues.  If there’s anything but a 0 in this column, it deserves some attention to find out exactly what is broken and why.

Metrics

Just like any other target in EM, you’ll find a wealth of information is collected about the agent target in Monitoring / All Metrics.  Each category can have multiple metrics collected.   You will find information here on certificate expiration, disk usage, memory usage, cpu usage,

agent1

When you click on the Category, the right-hand pane will show real-time data.   This can be very helpful in troubleshooting metric issues.  You will see the last upload time.  Metrics are uploaded every 15 minutes, so if it’s older than 15-20 min, the agent is having a problem.

agent2

Some of the metrics are very helpful, specifically in the EMD… categories.  In these metrics you’ll find information about agent and OMS communication (heartbeat, ping, and upload).    Take some time to review the metrics that are collected and available on your agents.

agent4

Reports

There are  a couple of Information Publisher reports that can be useful in identifying problems on Agents and other targets.   From Enterprise / Reports / Information Publisher, the first reports are under the Enterprise Manager Health category.

agentreports

Agent Clock Synchronization Offset will give you the agents whose system clock may be offset from the Repository system clock based on the timestamp of the last heartbeat recorded.  As many pieces of EM rely on the timestamp, an offset more than a few minutes can cause problems.

Agents in Questionable State shows Agents which are in Metric Error state, Agent Down state and Pending/Unknown state for the last 24 hours.

Agents Restarted shows the Agents which have restarted in the last 24 hours. If an Agent is consistently on this report, it’s a sign that it’s crashing.

Broken Targets is another view of the targets we looked at earlier, where they are misconfigured or not monitored for some reason. This is a good report to have emailed out regularly, to be sure you know what targets are having problems.

Targets Not Uploading Data is another one that EM Administrators should regularly view.   This is the report of the targets not uploading consistently, and the last upload date.

Another set of reports under the Target Status Diagnostics category, will help in diagnosing issues with specific targets.  Agent-based targets are going to be your Host, Database Instance, Listener.  Repository-based targets will be Cluster, Cluster Database, System, etc.  In a future post, I’ll break down these reports further.

agentreports2

In part 2 of this blog, we’ll take a look at using EMDIAG’s AGTVFY scripts, as well as looking at some of the Agent log files and common errors.   Stay tuned!

 

SMS Notifications From Enterprise Manager

Starting with Enterprise Manager (EM) 12c, you have the choice to send SMS notifications to a cell phone, or a pager (does anybody still use pagers?).  There’s been a couple questions on the forums about this so I thought I’d write it up since it appears to be a bit confusing as to how this works.

First, be sure that your Mail Server is setup in Setup / Notifications / Notification Methods and you can receive the test e-mail.

sms7

Next, create an EM administrator user, then login as that user to update your e-mail address and SMS/Pager information by clicking on the Username drop down menu and selecting Enterprise Manager Password & Email.

sms6

For the SMS/Pager, you need the text based address.  So if your provider was Verizon, it would be 8885555555@vtext.com.    Select the Email Type Pager for SMS messages as they are shorter than the Email format.   It’s important to note, that you will not see the multiple lines in the Setup / Security / Administrators view.  You can enter multiple e-mails separated by commas, but the E-mail Type option will not be available.

sms5

By default, both email and pager will be enabled in your Notification Schedule, you may adjust this as necessary by going to Setup / Notifications / My Notification Schedule.   You can receive notifications by both e-mail/page, just e-mail, or just page depending on what you configure here.

Next, you need to create an Incident Rule Set, or edit an existing one.   From Setup / Incidents / Incident Rules, select a rule set and rule to edit.  Once you get to the Action for the Rule, in the Basic Notifications section, select the EM Administrator in the Page box.  Save all changes.

sms8

In 12cR4, you can test the Incident Rule Set by selecting your Rule Set and clicking the Simulate Rules button (Setup / Incidents /  Incident Rules).  You will need to select a Target, Event Type and find an alert to simulate.  Then you will get a list of Actions that the Incident Rule Set will perform for this alert.

To test my notifications, I dropped the warning threshold on the tablespace metric to 15, something I know would trigger immediately.    Here’s the messages I received on my phone.

sms4

I also received the long format in my e-mail.  When you’re done testing, don’t forget to set your thresholds back!

 

Introducing Oracle Management Cloud…

Oracle Management Cloud

If you were at Oracle OpenWorld this year you might have had the chance to preview Oracle’s latest cloud service – Oracle Management Cloud (OMC).   The three OMC services launched this month are Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Log Analytics (LA) and IT Analytics (ITA).    The goal for OMC is to bring together different types of operational data for use by both businesses and IT.  All data is stored in a unified data platform that allows you to navigate from one service to another while working on specific use cases.   Here’s a quick overview of each service to get you up to speed.

Application Performance Monitoring

This service gives you insight into the end user performance and experience, from  browser statistics to  AJAX calls.  With statistics on page load times and errors, you can drill down to find errors, see the request calls, and review memory usage and garbage collection.

omcla4

The integration with Log Analytics allows the user to drill down to server and application logs related to the poor performance time periods.  By using saved searches and creating custom dashboards you can see the information that’s important to your application in one view.

omsla

Log Analytics

Upload all your logs to the cloud – database, application, middleware, server, infrastructure – then search and explore to identify problems or resolve issues.   Troubleshoot problems by exploring logs in context of the application using topology-aware log exploration. Then utilize the cluster feature to identify outliers or frequently occurring patterns.  There’s always a lot of noise in log files, so this allows you to filter out the noise and get to the real errors that you need to see.

la

Another key feature is the ability to correlate other logs within a time period.  Let’s say you found an error at 1:00, you can then see the log entries 1 minute before and after on different systems to identify any correlated log entries.    LA also includes the ability to save queries and use them in a dashboard so you can replicate your searches with ease.  Not to mention storing logs in the Oracle cloud instead of on your servers for long periods of time.

IT Analytics

Finally a way to look at IT resources holistically and see how targets in your environment compare to one another.  Resource Analytics will allow you to view current utilization as well as forecast things like storage and CPU across targets, or groups of targets. Answer questions like how much storage will we need in 6 months?  How about what databases are consuming the most CPU and how much have they increased recently?   itacpu1

With Performance Analytics you can identify bottlenecks across Database or Middleware targets.  Have you ever wondered what the worst SQL in your environment is?  I had a manager once who really liked to point out the worst performing SQLs across applications, how easy this will be now!

Probably the most exciting feature is the Data Explorer which allows you to create custom queries and save them as a dashboard that you can create for your unique requirements.   Below I’ve searched for database instances based on their DB Wait time, hovering over the chart you get a popup with the target, type of wait and value.  I can now save this widget to a dashboard if I like.itawaits

Learn More

More information on OMC can be found in this ebook from Oracle and on the Oracle Cloud website.   You can also watch the launch video here.   I will be posting more about each of the services over the next few weeks, as well as sharing my experiences with our first customer implementations, so stay tuned!

Automating the Mundane with Corrective Actions and Oracle Enterprise Manager

In my opinion, one of the most under-utilized features of Oracle Enterprise Manager is the Corrective Actions that can be triggered when a metric alert threshold is crossed.  I think one reason it’s under-utilized is it’s very hard to think about where to start and what can be automated.  My advice from previously implementing, is to look at the alerts that are generated, or tickets, and determine which ones are most frequent and mundane.  The one that always comes to mind is Archive Destination.

Archive was the first CA we implemented at my previous company, because we got at least 20 per day.  Since our backups were controlled by a different team, all we could do was cut a ticket to them, and possibly kick off an archive backup hoping it would complete this time.  So we put this in a Corrective Action.  The script checked for hung backups sessions, checked that a backup wasn’t already running, looked through a config file to get the right information, and then kicked off an archive backup job.   Then it sent an email to a ticketing queue for the backup team to generate the ticket so they could investigate why it was failing.    We set the CA to run on Warning, with a fairly low threshold so we had plenty of time to react if it got to Critical.  This was such a success that we went on to write more, including automating tablespace adds and sending notifications to the application teams when process/sessions was exceeded.

A friend of mine, Tyler Sharp, recently started implementing Corrective Actions and has found tremendous time savings.    He recently had the idea to automate oradebug steps so they would always have the required debug when working with Oracle Support, instead of having to go through the process manually the next time around.   The CA is triggered when > 4 active sessions waiting on concurrency, or over 900 seconds db blocking time.  He was kind enough to share the script they’ve implemented below:

conn / as sysdba
set serverout on

DECLARE
   trace_name   VARCHAR2 (1000) := NULL;
   alter_session   VARCHAR2 (1000) := NULL;

BEGIN
   SELECT to_char (SYSDATE, ‘MMDDYY_HHMISS’) INTO trace_name FROM DUAL;
   alter_session :=
         ‘alter session set tracefile_identifier=”’||trace_name||’_AUTO_HANGANALYZE”’;
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (alter_session);
   EXECUTE IMMEDIATE alter_session;
END;
/

oradebug setmypid;
oradebug unlimit;
oradebug dump ashdumpseconds 5
oradebug hanganalyze 3
execute sys.dbms_lock.sleep(180);
oradebug hanganalyze 3

As you can see, they set a trace file name, take an ashdump, then do the required hanganalyze twice with a  sleep in between.   Now the DBA can skip these steps when working an issue, and collect the files that were created at the right time, not 10 minutes later.   You’ll need to be sure to have a credential that has sysdba access to run this properly.

The great thing about Corrective Actions, is you can use them in a template so you can push them to all servers to keep your resolutions standard.    The Corrective Action is triggered for either Warning or Critical, or both.  Then you have the choice to get notified of that alert right away, or bypass notifications unless the Corrective Action failed.   This allows you a fall back in case the script or job has a problem fixing the issue.

To learn more about Corrective Actions, check the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control Administrator’s Guide and check out the following blog posts for more ideas!

What are the Corrective Actions you’ve implemented, or would like to implement in your environment?

Enterprise Manager at Oracle OpenWorld 2015

You might have heard by now, there’s this little meeting coming up in 9 days called Oracle Open World.  If you happen to be heading to San Francisco, drop by and see a few friends, or 50,000.

Be sure to register for my session!  This year will be a little different as I’ll be running a panel with 4 Enterprise Manager Champions!

Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Effectively to Become an Oracle Enterprise Manager Champion [CON9711]

Joseph Kopilash, Director, Database Administration, Epsilon Data Management LLC
Steve Meredith, Boeing Oracle Enterprise Manager Service Manager, Boeing
Tyler Sharp, Technology Architect, Cerner
Eric Siglin, Senior Database Administrator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas

In this panel discussion, customers share their experiences with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control and discuss how they’ve implemented features leading to significant cost savings and operational efficiency. Get started with deployment and management of agents and establishing initial thresholds for alerting. Simplify administration of users with active directory integration. Maintain security standards and increased productivity by patching fleets of databases and stay current with critical patch updates. Learn from customers how they’ve made use of out-of-the-box and custom reports to manage engineered systems, database, and middleware targets by exception. Benefit from these top customer dos and don’ts.

Wednesday, Oct 28, 11:00 a.m. | Moscone South—104

When not presenting or meeting with customers, you’ll find me at the Engineered Systems Showcase or Hybrid Cloud Management: Single Pane of Glass for Complete Management—On-Premises and Public Cloud (SLD-026) booths.  Be sure to stop by and say hi!

For the full list of EM related sessions, you can refer to the Focus On docs.    Here’s some highlights of other sessions you’ll find interesting!
Sunday 

For those of you who arrive on on Saturday, or early Sunday… and aren’t drawn away by the beautiful city of San Francisco, check out the IOUG SIG Sunday sessions that are going on all day Sunday!   Watch out, they’re no longer restricted to Moscone West rooms!  Here’s a few I’m going to try to get to!

8am – Alfredo Krieg delivers Monitor Engineered Systems from a Single Pane of Glass: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c [UGF10288] in Moscone South 270

10am – Erik Benner/Wassim Kayrala deliver Database Cloud in a Box—DBaaS on Oracle Database Appliance [UGF10279] in Moscone South 270

12pm – Rene Antunez delivers Private Cloud Provisioning Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c [UGF9959] in Moscone South 305

1:30pm – Ray Smith delivers You’ve Got It—Flaunt It: Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility [UGF9930] in Moscone South 305

Monday

12:15pm – Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Complete Solution and Oracle’s Best-Kept Secrets [CON9715] in Moscone South 300

Hear from Amit Ganesh, VP of Development for EM.

1:30pm – Managing at Hyper-Scale: Oracle Enterprise Manager as the Nerve Center of Oracle Cloud [CON9710] in Moscone South 300

Hear about how the Oracle Cloud relies on Oracle Enterprise Manager, and learn best practices for any implementation!

5-6pm – Join your fellow EM enthusiasts in the OTN Lounge (Moscone South) for the IOUG EM SIG.   Don’t worry if you’re not a member yet, stop by and get to know some of the folks you see on Twitter or hear speaking!

Tuesday

11am – General Session: Oracle Management Cloud—Real-Time Monitoring, Log, and IT Operations Analytics [GEN9778] in Moscone South 102

Definitely a must attend event!  Learn about Oracle’s newest offering Oracle Management Cloud.

Wednesday

After my session at 11am, there’s a lot going on at 12:15pm but if you’re interested in monitoring, I’d recommend  Way Beyond the Basics: Oracle Enterprise Manager Monitoring Best Practices [CON9721] in Moscone South 300.

https://events.rainfocus.com/oow15/catalog/focusOnDoc.jsp?focusId=18408

Thursday

https://events.rainfocus.com/oow15/catalog/focusOnDoc.jsp?focusId=18408

ECO 2015 Presentation

Had a great few days in Raleigh presenting and attending at the East Coast Oracle Users Group!    We ran out of time in the hand on lab, so if you’re looking for the metric and monitoring labs, you can find those in this post.    I’ve added my slides to slide share below

 

 

 

Standardize Target Monitoring with Templates

Enterprise Manager is a critical tool for monitoring database and middleware targets, as well as Engineered Systems and hosts.  Each target has it’s own set of metrics. If you read my previous posts on viewing metrics and setting thresholds, you’ve got a good understanding of how to set thresholds on a single target.  What if you have 100 targets?  Or a 1000?   Your targets for production may even have different thresholds then non-production.   Do you really want to manually set these metrics up on all targets?   Not likely.   If you have more than 3 databases or targets, you should probably consider standardizing your monitoring by using Monitoring Templates.   Templates allow you to  reuse the metrics you’ve defined for like targets.

From Enterprise menu, select Monitoring / Monitoring Templates.

temp1

You can see in the search box, you can display Oracle Certified templates. temp2

If you check this, you’ll find a long list of templates for various midddleware and application situations.

temp3

Create Template from Target

The first method to create a template is based on an existing target.  This allows you to configure your monitoring on one sample target, and copy this to a template.

Click Create.    Notice the copy monitoring settings from Target is selected.

temp4

Click the search icon to find the sample target you want to copy metrics from and click Select.temp5

First we need to give our template a name.  If you’re going to have multiple templates, it’s best to give them a detailed name to make them distinct and easily identified.     Notice the Default Template checkbox – if you check this, this template will be automatically applied to all new (not existing) Cluster Database targets as they are discovered in Enterprise Manager.  Only one default template per target type can be identified.

temp6

Click on Metric Thresholds and you will see a familiar screen with the target metrics and Warning and Critical thresholds.

temp7

If there’s additional metrics you want to add, or maybe remove from this template, click the Remove or Add metrics button.

temp8

When adding metrics, you’ll be able to search for another target, template or metric extension that you wish to add to this template.

temp9

When you’ve made your adjustments, click on the OK button to save your template.  You’ll get a confirmation when your template is created. temp10

Create from Target Type

From Monitoring Templates, click Create, this time select the option for Target Type.  This option will pull the default registered metrics for that particular target type.

temp4

Next you’ll select a category and the target type.  For Database, we will select Database Instance.    From here, the process is the same.  This template will have all default recommended metrics and you can make your adjustments from here.

temp15

Apply Templates

Now that you have a new template, you can select this template and click Apply to apply to any existing targets.    temp11

The Apply Options are important to consider.  By default, templates override only metrics common to template and target. This means if there’s a metric on the target, that is not included in the template, it is not removed or replaced.  If the metric has different thresholds or no thresholds, then it is updated to match the template.  The top option, to completely replace settings on the target will make the target identical to the target.   Which means if there are metrics not in the template, the apply will remove thresholds for those metrics and no longer alert.

temp12

The Key Values section tells the template apply how you want to handle those metrics such as Tablespace that might have multiple key values, say different thresholds for SYSTEM and SYSAUX tablespaces.

temp13

Click Add to select the targets or group you would like to apply the template to, and click Select.  Then click OK to submit the Apply job.

 

temp14

You can view the apply status from the Past Apply Operations button and get information on succeeded and failed operations.

So now you can take some time up front, standardize your metrics, and enforce them with templates.

 

Hands on Monitoring Exercises with Enterprise Manager

Dive deeper into the areas that interest you!   All steps can be done on your lab box or on your own Enterprise Manager system.

View Data with All Metrics

Modifying Metrics and Collections

Create a Template

Create a Metric Extension to notify on expiring DBSNMP accounts

Create a Metric Extension for Fast Recovery Area

Create a Repository-Side Metric Extension

Filter out a specific alert from incident rules

Managing Metric Thresholds in Enterprise Manager

One of the most critical steps in monitoring your targets with Enterprise Manager, is to set your metrics and thresholds properly for your environment.   All targets will have predefined metrics that will be enabled and thresholds set based on recommendations from Oracle product teams.    These may or may not be good for your environment.    Customers all have different requirements for what they want to be e-mailed, paged or notified by ticket about.

The most common metrics for databases are going to be the ones that cause service outages:  availability, space issues, archiver issues, data guard gaps, critical ORA- errors.   Some things, you just don’t need to know about at 2am though, things like global cache blocks lost.

From the target menu, select Monitoring / Metric and Collection Settings.  This will show you the current settings of your target.  Notice the default view is Metrics with Thresholds.  Other items are collected and can be seeing in the All Metrics view.

metric2

Let’s take a closer look at what we see here.  First we have the metric grouping or category.  Then for each metric in the group, you’ll have the operator, warning and critical thresholds.  These are the most important.  If you don’t provide a value, alerts will not be triggered as there will be no threshold violations.  The next column displays if a corrective action job has been registered on this metric. Followed by the collection schedule and Edit icon.

metric3

 

Clicking on the link in Collection Schedule will bring you to the collection settings.  You can enable or disable a metric collection, change the frequency, and determine whether alert only or historical trending data will be saved.   If you select alert only, it will only store occurrences where thresholds are violated.  Pay careful attention to the Affected Metrics section, as some metrics are collected in a group, and modifying these settings will affect all metrics in that group.

metric4

Returning to the main screen, click on the pencil icon to edit the metric.

metric6

This first section is where you can add a Corrective Action job if you want to automatically fix your alerts.  An example would be kicking off a RMAN archive log backup job when Archive Area Used % event is triggered.

metric7

In the Advanced Threshold section, you can determine how many times a threshold must be exceeded in a row to trigger an alert.  So if you want to alert if CPU is 95% for over 3 collections (15 minutes), then you would set Number of Occurrences to 3.

metric8

Template override allows an administrator to prevent a particular metric from being changed when templates are applied.  You want to avoid this as a common practice and reserve for special exceptions.

metric9

 

 

The Threshold Suggestion section allows you to evaluate what warning and critical severity alerts  would be generated if you changed thresholds.  You can look at the last month of collected metrics to make the best threshold estimates.  metric11

If your metric has multiple keys, you will have an additional screen where you can add additional keys.  A key would be a filesystem, or a tablespace that you want to monitor with different thresholds then the rest.

metric5

Whey you’re finished making changes, clicking Continue and OK to save metric changes to the repository and push out to the Agent.   Once you get a target set up for monitoring the way you want, you can create a template to push the same settings to all like targets.   I’ll cover this in another post soon!