Perl for Oracle DBAs

Chapter 11. Monitoring the Database with the PDBA Toolkit

So far we have looked at a variety of scripts in the Perl DBA Toolkit and have seen how they can help make our lives as Oracle DBAs more productive. In this chapter we’re going to focus on two particularly urgent areas of DBA activity:

Alert log monitoring

The Oracle database alert log is an important source of information about error conditions, and DBAs need to keep a careful eye on this file. However, finding the time to do manual monitoring is difficult for most DBAs. In this chapter, we’ll create an alert log monitor that detects Oracle errors and messages and emails them to specific addresses, all in real time. The primary scripts used to do this monitoring are ckalert.pl, ckalert_NT.pl, and ckalert.conf.

Connectivity monitoring

DBAs also need to constantly monitor all of their Oracle databases to ensure that connections to these databases can be established. If a database goes down, the DBA needs to find out about the problem — and fix it — ideally before users are even aware that their connectivity has been affected. In this chapter we’ll describe a toolkit connectivity monitor that does this real-time monitoring using the scripts dbup.pl, dbup_NT.pl, and dbup.conf.

Monitoring the Alert Log

When an Oracle database is created, a file commonly referred to as the alert log is created. As errors and other conditions occur during processing, messages are logged to this file. Basically, every important event that occurs ...