The Oracle agent provides two levels of monitoring: basic and detail. By default, the agent does a basic monitoring.
The MonitorOption attribute of the Oracle resource determines whether 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_dbw0, ora_smon, ora_pmon, ora_lmon, and ora_lgwr processes to verify that Oracle is running. In this mode, the agent also supports intelligent resource monitoring. See How the Oracle and Netlsnr agents support intelligent resource monitoring. |
1 |
Health check (supported on Oracle 11g 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. The agent does not support intelligent resource monitoring in this mode. |
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, Veritas recommends that instances started outside VCS control be configured with the correct Owner attribute corresponding to the OS user for that instance.
In the detail monitoring mode, the agent performs a transaction on a test table in the database to ensure that Oracle database functions properly. The agent uses this test table for internal purposes. Veritas recommends that you do not perform any other transaction on the test table.
More Information
How the agent handles Oracle error codes during detail monitoring