Using Metrics and Alerts

Copyright © 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to do the

following:
• View metrics by using the metrics history views
• Create metric thresholds
• View alerts

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 Metrics and Alerts

• Metric: Rate of change in a cumulative statistic

• Alert: Event generated when a monitored metric crosses a
threshold

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 Limitation of Base Statistics

2M

High rate
V$SYSSTAT
I/O
Physical reads 30 minutes

Time
2M
Low rate

30 minutes
I/O
Statistics just keep
growing.

Time

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 Typical Delta Tools

• Comparison of statistics at two points in time is needed.

• The following tools produce deltas:
– AWR reports
– Statspack
– Customized scripts

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 Oracle Database 11g Solution: Metrics

V$SYSMETRIC V$FILEMETRIC
V$METRICNAME
V$SESSMETRIC V$EVENTMETRIC

V$SERVICEMETRIC V$WAITCLASSMETRIC

Client 1 Client 2 Client 3 Client 4

MMON Metric 1 Metric 2 Redo generation/Tx

Base statistic 1

Redo generation User commit User rollback

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 Benefits of Metrics

DBA

Query a metric.
Analyze differences.

Without metrics With metrics

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 Viewing Metric History Information

• In memory:
– V$SYSMETRIC_HISTORY (last hour)
– V$FILEMETRIC_HISTORY
– V$WAITCLASSMETRIC_HISTORY (last hour)
– V$SERVICEMETRIC_HISTORY
– V$SESSION_WAIT_HISTORY (last 10 events)
• On disk:
– DBA_HIST_SYSMETRIC_SUMMARY
– DBA_HIST_SYSMETRIC_HISTORY
– DBA_HIST_SESSMETRIC_HISTORY
– DBA_HIST_SYSTEM_EVENT (cumulative)
– DBA_HIST_FILEMETRIC_HISTORY (alerts only)
– DBA_HIST_FILESTATXS (cumulative)
– DBA_HIST_WAITCLASSMET_HISTORY (alert)

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 Using EM to View Metric Details

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 Statistic Histograms

High rate
V$SYSSTAT
I/O
Physical reads 30 minutes

Time Is it a
real
5500 problem?
V$FILE_HISTOGRAM
Number
of
waits

Time
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 … 222 period

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 Histogram Views

• V$EVENT_HISTOGRAM: For each event such as “db file

sequential read”
• V$FILE_HISTOGRAM: For single block reads on a per
data file basis

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 Server-Generated Alerts

Enterprise Manager

Alert
queue
Oracle
instance
Metric exceeds
threshold.

AWR

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 Alert Usage Model

Enable alerts by setting thresholds.

Set up notification rules (paging, email).

Receive notification.

Review alert details and advice.

Correct the problem.

Verify that the problem is resolved.

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 Setting Thresholds

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 Creating and Testing an Alert

1. Specify a threshold.
2. Create a test case.
3. Check for an alert.

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 Metric and Alert Views

Recent metrics Metric history Server alerts

DBA_HIST_SYSMETRIC_HISTORY
...

DBA_OUTSTANDING_ALERTS
V$SYSMETRIC_HISTORY
DBA_ALERT_HISTORY
V$SYSMETRIC
DBA_THRESHOLDS
V$SERVICEMETRIC
V$ALERT_TYPES
V$METRICNAME
...
...

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 Quiz

An alert appeared on the Enterprise Manager database about

two hours ago, and then disappeared. You do not remember
the text. You can look in DBA_ALERT_HISTORY to find the
cleared alert.
a. True
b. False

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 Summary

In this lesson, you should have learned how to:

• View metrics by using the metrics history views
• Create metric thresholds
• View alerts

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 Practice Overview 5:
Working with Metrics
This practice covers the following topics:
• Viewing metrics using the metrics history views
• Creating metric thresholds
• Viewing alerts
• Clearing alerts

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