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Monitor options for Oracle agent
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Monitor options for Oracle agent

The Oracle agent provides two levels of monitoring: basic and detail. By default, the agent does a basic monitoring.

The basic monitoring mode has the following options:

Process check
Health check

The MonitorOption attribute of the Oracle resource determines whether the the agent must perform basic monitoring in Process check or Health check mode.

Table: Basic monitoring options describes the basic monitoring options.

Table: Basic monitoring options

Option	Description
0 (Default)	Process check The agent scans the process table for the ora_dbw, ora_smon, ora_pmon, and ora_lgwr processes to verify that Oracle is running.
1	Health check (supported on Oracle 10g and later) The agent uses the Health Check APIs from Oracle to monitor the SGA and retrieve the information about the instance. If you want to use the Oracle agent's intentional offline functionality, you must enable Health check monitoring. See How the agent makes Oracle highly available.

Option

Description

(Default)

Process check

The agent scans the process table for the ora_dbw, ora_smon, ora_pmon, and ora_lgwr processes to verify that Oracle is running.

Health check (supported on Oracle 10g and later)

The agent uses the Health Check APIs from Oracle to monitor the SGA and retrieve the information about the instance.

If you want to use the Oracle agent's intentional offline functionality, you must enable Health check monitoring.

See How the agent makes Oracle highly available.

Review the following considerations if you want to configure basic monitoring:

Basic monitoring of Oracle processes is user-specific. As a result, an Oracle instance started under the context of another user cannot be detected as online. For example, if an Oracle instance is started under the user "oraVRT" and the agent is configured for a user "oracle", the agent will not detect the instance started by "oraVRT" as online.

This could lead to situations where issuing a command to online a resource on a node might online an already running instance on that node (or any other node).

So, Symantec recommends that instances started outside VCS control be configured with the correct Owner attribute corresponding to the OS user for that instance.
Within a failover service group, when the administrator onlines an Oracle resource on a node and if the Oracle instance is online on any other node within a cluster, the instance would come up. However, the database does not get mounted. In such circumstances, this failure is detected only by health check monitoring option of basic monitoring or detail monitoring. Detail monitoring updates the database table after detecting a failure whereas health check monitoring does not.

If health check monitoring option of basic monitoring or detail monitoring is not configured, then such a conflict would go undetected.

In the detail monitoring mode, the agent performs a transaction on a test table in the database to ensure that Oracle functions properly. The DetailMonitor attribute of the Oracle resource determines whether the the agent must perform detail monitoring.

See Setting up detail monitoring.

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