Configuration Of Metrics And Policies In Oracle Enterprise Manager

Configuration of Metrics and Policies in Oracle Enterprise Manager Configuration of Metrics in Oracle Enterprise Manager

11 juli 2007

Putting it all in action First we start creating a spreadsheet to put all info together.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR2 Monitoring targets using OEM heavily leans on Metrics and Policies. As you must have noticed, after installation of Oracle Enterprise Manager Hundreds of metrics and polices are installed. These metrics and policies will most probably start generating tons of alerts and at the end of the day you might end up with an EM console indicating many target alerts and policy violations. This paper will focus on the configuration of metrics by using monitoring templates. As seen in many organisations it proves to be pretty difficult to get things organized. Which metric is important to be monitored and what values make sense as warning and critical threshold?

The spreadsheet could contain the following columns:

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Metric Business risk Business impact User action Consecutive Number of Occurrences Preceding Notification Warning threshold Critical threshold Collection schedule

Of course you can add other columns, if that makes sense for your specific needs.

When trying to answer these questions, one should start asking himself for each metric: •

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What risk is there for the continuity of services when this metric’s warning or critical thresholds are met and an alert is generated? What should be the reaction of the DBA staff if a warning or critical alert is generated? If we are unable to specify such a reaction, it does not make sense to monitor this metric, because what to do if.? More specifically you would also want to know: what are the right values for warning and critical thresholds?

To make sure what metrics you should ask these questions for, start figuring out what types of targets are you monitoring? Hosts, Database Instances, Clusters, Cluster Databases, Listeners, Agents, OC4J, BPEL_Process_Manager etc. For each of these target types we will create monitoring templates.

Take a closer look to the spreadsheet Let’s see how we are going to use the spreadsheet. Metric The Name of the metric. Example: “Data Block Corruption Error Stack” Business risk What risk is there for the continuity of services when this metric’s warning or critical thresholds are met and an alert is generated? Example: “Loss of business data” Business impact What impact does this risk has for the business? Example: “High”

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Configuration of Metrics and Policies in Oracle Enterprise Manager User action What should be the next thing to do for the DBA? Example: “Consider database or tablespace recovery.”

11 juli 2007

In order to apply all metric thresholds to you targets, you should apply the monitoring templates to these targets.

Consecutive umber of Occurrences Preceding otification After how many violations should an alert be triggered? Example: When you like to be alerted at the moment CPU usage starts exceeding 80%, it might be wise to do this after the CPU usage exceeds 80% for 3 consecutive occurrences. As on a busy production system high CPU usage can occur, this might indicate a structural problem when occurring for 15 minutes. Warning and critical thresholds Here you will specify the threshold values for the warning and critical alert level. Creating templates After finishing the analysis of metrics in you spreadsheet, the next thing to do would be creating the monitoring templates. Create standard templates for each target type that needs to be monitored. Create customized templates for customer / project specific situations. These customized templates should only contain metric threshold settings that are different from the threshold settings in the standard templates. So you might end up with something like:

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CT-Cluster-P0022 CT-Cluster-P0045 CT-Single-Database-Instance-CUST32

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ST-Agent ST-Cluster ST-Cluster-Database ST-Cluster-Instance ST-Host ST-Listener ST-Single-Database-Instance

This example shows 3 customized templates, of which 2 are project and 1 is customer specific and 7 standard templates.

Copyright © 2007 Rob Zoeteweij E-mail: [email protected] Blog: http://mcbobsstruggle.typepad.com/oracle_ enterprise_manager/

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