As you might know I am Swiss guy and we are famous for our hand-crafted, precise watches and exact work we do. I am always trying to find other great things which also match these qualities. In terms of SCOM I like management packs which work precise like Swiss watches and are as useful as a Swiss Army knife.
One management pack that fits into these categories is the OpsLogix Oracle Intelligent Management Pack. OpsLogix is a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner which develops innovative products for managing your infrastructure. They have many good management packs which cover non-Microsoft technologies like Blackberry, Oracle, NetApp etc. and also offer a management pack for capacity management.
Because I got the chance to evaluate the Oracle MP I would like to share some impressions and functionality.
Don’t worry this is not a walkthrough how to install and configure this MP because Stanislav Zhelyazkov has already written a good blog post covering the installation topic.
I would like to focus on the additional features this MP offers. After you installed and configured the MP you will have a well monitored Oracle database. But what if you would like to collect additional performance data which might not be included or you want to be warned if a certain value breaches a configured threshold? Luckily, there are easy to configure Management Pack Templates available which will take care of these scenarios.
If you installed the management pack, in the Authoring pane you will find these three templates…
- Oracle Alert Rule
Allows you to create a Rule that will check a value from your Oracle environment and generate an alert in the event that the value is detected or missing depending on the configuration you specify. - Oracle Performance Collection Rule
Allows you to create a Rule that will collect performance data from your Oracle environment in order to visualize the data on the corresponding performance view. - Oracle Two-State Monitor Template
Allows you to create a Monitor that will check the health of an element according to the configuration you specified. It will also generate an alert in the event that the monitor turns to an unhealthy state.
Ok cool, but how do we use them?
Well, let’s assume I run a salary database called HR in my company. Because I am a Swiss guy and the boss, I like to control the salary. Because of that I want to monitor this instance:).
My HR database contains a table with name, job title and salary. The table looks like this…
I will show for each management pack template an example.
Oracle Alert Rule
I am the salary administrator and boss, I think nobody should earn more money than I do. Therefore I will create an Oracle Alert Rule to get an alert if someone earns more than 20’000 Swiss Francs…
Just start the management pack template wizard and give the rule a name and store it in a unsealed MP…
Next we use a select statement which counts the rows which have a salary higher than 20000…
If there is a count of equal 1 we will receive an alert. Here you can just select the expression “Equal” or “Not equal”, but at the end I show you how to modify this rule to have an expression “Greater than”…
Give the alert a name, description and set the proper priority and severity…
After you finished the wizard, you will be able to see the template…
And in a short while we receive an alert, that someone gets more money than me…
If you click on the rule Properties/Configuration you will see the data sources. Click on the blue Edit… link and there you will be able to modify the filter criteria…
Our default setting was “Equals” and we are now able to select “Greater than”…
After you modified the filter value close the dialog and click on the “Edit…” button in the response section you will be able to modify the alert description. Here we used a variable $Data/Property[@Name=’Salary’]$ which contains the return value from the SQL query…
Close all dialogs and let the rule do its work, in a few minutes we receive an alert with the new description…
Oracle Performance Collection Rule
As you remember I want total control over my expenses and I would like to have a salary performance counter which shows me the average salary in my company. Doesn’t that sound cool? Ok, lets do a performance collection rule….
Start the management pack template, add a rule name and save it into a unsealed management pack…
Next, we add the performance counter name and the SQL statement…
Click create and you will find the configured template…
Go to the Monitoring pane, select the Instance Performance view and search for your performance counter in my case Salary Performance…
I am able to tell that either we hired a new employee who earns more than the average or someone got a salary raise…hmmm…
Oracle Two-State Monitor Template
The last template will be used to show the health state of the instance we are running our monitor against. So, in our company we have a policy that says nobody should get more than 50’000 Swiss Francs. If this is the case we have an unhealthy database and just one happy fellow and that’s not me…
Lets start the management pack template, add a name for the monitor and save it into an unsealed management pack…
Next, we are going to query the salary table and return the salary column…
On the next dialog we create the criteria which will set the monitor into a critical health state if there is a value higher than 50000…
Now you only need to add name for the alert and a meaningful description…
Et voilà, the template has been configured…
Open the HealthExplorer from the Oracle instance and you will find the monitor…
And if there is a violation of the threshold, we receive an alert…
Here you are also able to modify the monitor properties and add variables as needed, here $Data/Context/Property[@Name=’Salary’]$ for the salary value…
Now we get the value which was invalid…
…and of course the instance state changed to critical…
Summary: My samples above are of course just some made-up stories but I hope you get the idea behind it. If you understand how these templates work you will find plenty of usable ways to utilize it and get proper monitoring for your infrastructure.
OpsLogix offers a great management pack which allows you to monitor your databases in no time. In addition the management pack offers an easy way to add custom rules, monitors and performance counters. Another great thing is that the OpsLogix Oracle Management Pack is designed to monitor Oracle 10g and 11g servers installed on any type of OS platform and is ready for SCOM 2012 R2.
What do you need more?
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