I know a number of us performance tuning DBAs who’ve long wanted to retain AWR data, at least high-level AWR data for an extended period outside of the AWR repository on the local database. I implemented my own solution back in 2009-2010 at a previous employer as I was tired of hearing, “nothing’s changed”. Nothing like having the high-level AWR data on CPU, IO, network, application and concurrency waits to rebuke this type of assumption at budget decision time…. 🙂 The AWR data is collected as snapshots from ASH, AWR and ADDM in the target databases and then loaded to…
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If you have the Diagnostics/Tuning Management Packs and EM12c, you should be installing ASH Analytics to get the full benefit of optimization data that is available via the AWR and ASH. ASH Analytics is the future of the Top Activity view and I’ve written a number of posts on the value of the ASH Analytics product. With EM12c Release 4, there are a few, small improvements in the ASH Analytics installation. Where before, there were some challenges to verification of installation success, checking the status of a scheduled installation job, now it’s much easier. If the ASH Analytics package hasn’t…
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I talk a lot about Enterprise Manager 12c, from the OMS all the way to the EM CLI and the Agent, but I was discussing some interesting history with the account used by the OEM Management Agent- the DBSNMP account. The origination of the DBSNMP account was to support Oracle SNMP, (Simple Network Management Protocol.) Back in Oracle 7-8i days, this account was vulnerable to all kinds of nasty issues and there were steps that administrators needed to take to secure it- from making the snmp_rw.ora file inaccessible except to the ORACLE OS user, (residing in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory) to…
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I’m still asked this question, as I’ve worked for some really fantastic companies in the past and the idea that I “gave up” my Oracle ACE Director and my voting board position at RMOUG seems a high price to pay when I could have gone anywhere. I do appreciate it, as many just want what’s best for me, so I do take this into consideration. I decided a while back that with all Enterprise Manager Cloud Control encompassed, that it was what I really wanted to specialize in. I spent time reading everything I could get my hands on, talked…
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Most of you know I don’t like pink, but I also am not a fan of yellow. Yellow houses Yellow flowers Yellow in my EM12c summary page You know what yellow I’m talking about: Now I’m just as disturbed by the red section of that graph, but today, we’re going to focus on the unknown, the yellow. If something is down, then you know it isn’t uploading data and is most definitely a critical issue, but what about the unknown? Why is Enterprise Manager reporting something is unknown? To first tackle this type of summary, we need to know the…
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I’m often asked what management pack is used by what feature and there is actually a very easy way to find out this information in the EM12c console. Let’s say we are in ASH Analytics and want to view what management packs are required as part of this feature utilization: Click on the global Setup menu in the upper right, then click on Management Packs and Packs for this Page– You will quickly see a pop up page that shows you what management pack(s) are required to use the ASH Analytics feature: If we jumped to SQL Monitor and did…
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So back at the end of the EM CAB, I’d received an email stating I had an over-sized database and too many hits to continue on Go Daddy as the host for my website. I called into tech support to understand what options I had, but was never told that I had any option but leaving Go Daddy as my hosting service. I was told I had two weeks per the email, but asked for three and was told on the phone that wasn’t a problem. I then did some research and decided that Blue Host had done well supporting…
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We are back to REPVFY, (Repository Verification Utility) this week, (first post can be found here…) And I’m onto the next file of substance since looking at the advisor log, (performance data). The next files are the two “details” files. One is a query used to produce the output and the second is the actual output from it. These two files are clearly named and can be found with the following naming convention: details_<timestamp>.sql details_<timestamp>.log If you are curious about what the details_<timestamp>.sql is doing as it produces the output, well you’re in luck, as I’m going to go step…
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When working with Top Activity, we’re accustomed to viewing to wait class in the top, graphed area and below left, the top SQL by SQL_ID and below right is our Top Session information. ASH Analytics was designed so you would enter into a view that looked very similar to Top Activity, but was enhanced so the user could update it to view the data in multiple ways. In Enterprise Manager’s traditional view of Top Activity, it is easy to recognize the similarities with ASH Analytics but that’s where much of it stops. The user has the ability to change not just the…
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The last couple weeks I’ve been lucky enough to get time with a new ZFSSA Simulator, (it will be out soon for everyone, so you’ll have to just play with the current one available, patience grasshopper! :)) and spent checking out the newest features available with Database as a Service, (DBaaS) Snapclone via Enteprise Manager 12c. I’m really thrilled with Snapclone- In two previous positions, I spent considerable time finding new ways of speeding up RMAN duplicates to ease the stress of weekly datamart builds that were sourced off of production and this feature would have been a lifesaver back…
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This is the first of many posts I’ll do where we take a particular issue and trouble-shoot. I’ll go through multiple scenarios to show the common steps to take via the Enterprise Manager 12c from discovery to identification to research to explanation. This blog will use the following features: ASH Analytics SQL Details ASH Report The first thing we need is an issue- Note the CPU red line- the IO is considerably over that and quite a lot of IO, along with Commit and Concurrency waits. We’ll start with this as our issue that we can see, has quickly escalated…
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There are a number of Verification Utilities for Enterprise Manager 12c, (EM12c) and I’ve written about them before, but today I’m going to start on the Repository Verification Utility, (REPVFY). This will be an ongoing series, as there are so many valuable features rolled into the utility and new ones that will be added as new patches and releases happen. For this post, I’m going to be reviewing a level 2 diagnostics report from a new repository database. This is going to offer us all kinds of valuable data about the environment and should be considered by any EM12c administrator…
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Now that we learned in Part I how to create a notification schedule for a specified user so that it will only page one individual on an oncall rotation, I’ll now show you how to use this in conjunction with rulesets to complete the process of modernizing and automating your oncall. In my Test scenario, I’ve already made copies of the main rule sets, have deviated rules by three rules and four groups, (mission critical, production, test and development.) Mission critical are all systems that I WANT to be paged for after hours and need to know immediately if there…
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I came across a discussion on Oracle-l on how after hours paging was handled for many companies and was kind of surprised how many DBAs still carry around a secondary pager/cell phone or are just expected to be woke up if on call or not. I’m not one to go back to sleep once I’m woke, so I’ve been a proponent of EM notification schedules for after hours paging. Now there are other ways to handle this in Enterprise Manager 12c as well, but we’ll use this method, as it is backward compatible to OEM 10g, too. The requirement of…
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Lately I’ve been having more discussions on securing the EM12c environment. All of IT has a tendency to treat the Enterprise Manager as a afterthought in both hardware allocation, as well as security best practices. No one is sure of exactly why this is- they all have their theories, but we do know it happens often. Today we are going to go over some of the auditing options within EM12c. Basic auditing is turned on by default in the environment, but only covers basics processes. There are over 150 auditing options and extensive information can be collected, retained within the…
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I know that folks have been having some challenges downloading my slides from Collaborate for a couple of my sessions and I know I’ve received errors when updating two of them the other day, so I’ve added them to my slideshare location for your convenience. Thank you for everyone who attended my sessions- such great turn outs and fantastic attendee participation! I had some real EM12c stars in the audience and appreciated the support and banter! My slideshare list for download can be accessed from here. Thank you to IOUG, Oracle and everyone for their support!
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I’m often present to overhear comments like the following when issues arise: I *think* someone changed something. I bet some DBA changed a parameter! I know <insert name of person on the bad list> is running that process I told him/her not to! Making assumptions vs. having data is a good way to alienate peers, coworkers and customers. There is a great feature in the EM12c that I’ve recommended that can easily answer the “What changed?” questions and deter folks from making so many assumptions about who’s guilty without any data to support the conclusion. It’s called the ADDM Compare…
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Tim and I leave for Oslo on Monday for the OUGN, (Oracle User Group Norway) conference. This is a great conference that many of my friends have talked about for the last couple years and I finally let Oyvind talk me into going. The conference is on a cruise ship that leaves from Oslo and sails for three days. We’ll be quite busy- Tim and I will be doing a keynote, “Assumptions, Killer of First Dates and Databases Everywhere”, then I’ll be presenting “DBaaS in a DBAs World” and “Master EM12c Monitoring”. I will also have the opportunity to host…