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Thread: Monitoring and Management

  1. #1
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    Question Monitoring and Management

    We're considering BMC Patrol, Quest Foglight, or Oracle Enterprise Manager for our main tool for database monitoring and management. The latest word I have is that OEM is alot better and BMC is still very expensive.

    Have you used any of these tools and can you offer your overall experience please.

    I'm also curious if anyone has (or knows where I can find) a feature and/or price comparison.

    Thank you
    "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." Isaac Asimov
    Oracle Scirpts DBA's need

  2. #2
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    I've used Quest's Spotlight (I think it's similar to Foglight) and really liked it. It had a few bugs, but did well for monitoring performance. The historical graphs came it very handy when the business folks said.."We had a performance problem 30 minutes ago". It doesn't have the admin features though (I'm not sure about Foglight). So we used DBArtisan's Embarcedaro for Admin.

    At my new shop, we have neither, so I use OEM. It's okay, but doesn't have everything I would like. It's charts only go back 15 minutes unless you are recording, can't sort Indexes by Tablespace, can't select multiple tables to truncate, etc. (I've only used OEM for a couple months, so I may be missing some things with it though)

    Just my 2 cents...

    Jodie

  3. #3
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    IMHO performance-tuning tools are valuble only to the extent that the user is competent and understands what the tool is doing. The tool smoothes the way a little (or a lot), and perhaps saves some grunt work of looking up scripts; but, in the end, the tool is not doing the performance tunung - the DBA is.

    So rather than going for fancy tools i would suggest use OEM, its good enough to let you know the troublesome queries. After all its you who is going to fix the queries.
    Amar
    "There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."

    Amar's Blog  Get Firefox!

  4. #4
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    Thank you Jodie. I'd say that's worth more than 2 cents.

    The only problem we had with Spotlight was that it ate memory and according to Quest wasn't designed to run 24/7. They suggested we get Foglight to monitor and alert and use Spotlight to dig into a specific problem or for short term analysis.

    One of our SQL Server DBA's had some really tough problems getting DB Artisan installed, so we passed on it. Their tech support folks couldn't walk him through the install. Maybe we should throw it back in the mix.

    What version of OEM are you running? Does the agent have much of a drag on the server?

    We use SQL Navigator and OEM for object and code changes.

    -Ken
    "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." Isaac Asimov
    Oracle Scirpts DBA's need

  5. #5
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    Amar,

    I'm really not talking about performance tuning. I'm looking for software for database monitoring and management.

    For example: software that will automatically add or stretch a datafile for a table(space) that has dropped down below a 5% threshold. Then send an email and/or a page to the DBA. That's one of a hundred things on our wish list.
    "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." Isaac Asimov
    Oracle Scirpts DBA's need

  6. #6
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    Ken,
    I would agree Spotlight isn't for 24/7. We just ran it when we were there, etc. Like Amar said, we used it to monitor performance, but we did the tuning ourselves.

    DB Artisan is a pain to install (you have to call the company to get an unlock code everytime you install it). But I really liked some of the things you could do with it. You may want to check it out again.

    I'm really not talking about performance tuning. I'm looking for software for database monitoring and management.

    For example: software that will automatically add or stretch a datafile for a table(space) that has dropped down below a 5% threshold. Then send an email and/or a page to the DBA. That's one of a hundred things on our wish list.
    From my understanding, OEM does a good job of this type of thing. Of course I'm not permitted to use that functionality as all of our JOBS must go through a central scheduler that does many types of systems (DB2, NT, Unix, etc) that is monitored by operators. So I can't speak for how it actually works.

    We are using OEM 9.2.0.3. The agent did cause us some trouble at first (Platform is AIX 5.2). The agent was sucking up 100% of the CPU. We have to kill the OS level dbsnmp processes before we start the agent. Then it works like a champ!

    HTH

    Jodie

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