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Oracle database insights

Early Adopter Release

Database insights adds an infrastructure perspective to your database monitoring. With additional data fetched from the database layer, you're able to resolve performance problems that are rooted deep in the database.

How it works

Database insights runs on an Environment ActiveGate and connects remotely to Oracle databases. With this approach, the database system platform can be of any type—DESK supports all operating systems using the JDBC driver to connect to databases.

Oracle insights architecture

Prerequisites

You need the following to start using Database insights with your Oracle database:

  • Environment ActiveGate version 1.173+ installed in the default mode. Database insights doesn't support an ActiveGate that's configured for multi-environment support.
  • Database insights requires 2.5 MB of RAM per Oracle database endpoint, which translates to a capability to monitor a few hundred databases with ActiveGate installed on the EC2 micro instance.
  • DESK Server version 1.173+
  • Network communication between the ActiveGate and the Oracle Server
  • Oracle version 11g or 12c (no support for RAC, AWS Oracle RDS, and Oracle Pluggable Databases [PDBs])
  • Optional OneAgent installed on the Oracle host
  • An Oracle database user with permissions listed below.

Oracle permissions

You need to satisfy the following permissions on the Oracle server for Oracle database insights:

  • The user that connects to the DB instance needs to be granted the CREATE SESSION and SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE permissions. This also means the access to Dynamic Performance Views, which is a part of the SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE permission.
  • DBMS_XPLAN package with granted EXECUTE permission is required to fetch execution plans.

To create a user for Oracle database insights:

CREATE USER oracleinsights IDENTIFIED BY password
default tablespace users
temporary tablespace temp;

GRANT CREATE SESSION, SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE TO <oracleinsights>;

Setting up Oracle insights

Setting up Oracle insights is straightforward. All you have to do is to define an endpoint—the Oracle database that the ActiveGate will connect to. You can add as many databases from a single Oracle server as necessary.

  1. Optional Install OneAgent on the Oracle host.
  2. Select or install and Environment ActiveGate version 1.173+ that will fetch the data from your Oracle server. You can use this ActiveGate for other purposes as well. Go to Settings > Deployment status to verify if your ActiveGate is up and running. Database insights is enabled by default.
  3. Go to Settings > Monitored technologies and find the Database insights: Oracle row. Click the pen icon to edit it.
  4. Define your Oracle database endpoint. All fields are mandatory. Define:
  • Oracle host
  • port (if other than default 1521)
  • database identifier (SID)
  • database user with the read access to v$ views and password
  • name of the database you want to monitor. Accept the redistribution license agreement for the JDBC driver. DESK uses this to fetch the data from your Oracle server. Your data is secure.
  1. Click Add database. If DESK can establish the connection using the details you've provided, DESK will start monitoring your Oracle database.

To disable or enable Database insights, use the flags from the [dbagent] section of the ActiveGate custom.properties file. For more information, see Configure ActiveGate).

Oracle database insights monitoring model

You database performance analysis will vary depending on your monitoring model, either with or without OneAgent installed on the Oracle host.

Without OneAgent

The analysis will be limited to metrics fetched from the Oracle server. To drill down to the individual databases, start from the Custom device created for the particular Oracle server.

With OneAgent

The Database insights metrics will be complemented with the host metrics collected by OneAgent. The code-level based monitoring will create a process group from which you'll be able to drill down to individual databases.

Oracle database insights capabilities

Most time-consuming Oracle statements

Understand and analyze which Oracle statements are the most expensive and most frequently called. Click View statements in the Most time-consuming Oracle statements section. The page lists the 100 most time consuming statements. With a single click, you can see which statements consume the most CPU, memory, disk storage, or generate the most wait time. You can customize your analysis using up to three metrics available for TopN analysis.

Download execution plans

When analyzing the performance characteristics of a SQL statement, you often find yourself in need of generating and displaying the execution plan of a SQL statement. You can download the Oracle execution plan right from the DESK UI.

Memory and cache metrics

Oracle database insights provide you with additional Oracle metrics related to memory and caches, which enables you to pinpoint the RAM heavy statements.

Custom charts

All the Oracle-native metrics fetched by Oracle database insights are available for custom charts.

Wait and tablespace metrics

You can also refer to the wait and tablespace metrics, which are available to be used in your custom charts

Oracle process groups

We bind the data fetched by Oracle database insights with the Oracle processes detected by OneAgent. Starting with OneAgent version 1.173, each Oracle process group represents a single Oracle SID (unique identifier for every Oracle DB instance). The SID is part of the process group name, and is extracted from process names (Unix) or service description (Windows). Oracle processes not associated with any SID form an Oracle other processes group. This includes the communication process, TNS Listener, so all incoming and outgoing traffic is associated with the group.

FAQ

Is Database insights based on a plugin?
No, Database insights is the default DESK feature since version 1.173.

What is the license model?
The current Early Adopter Release of Database insights is free, available with every ActiveGate and DESK server version 1.173+. In the future, the price will be based on the number of consumed metrics.

Can I use a Cluster ActiveGate for Database insight?
No. You can only use an Environment ActiveGate that remotely connects to your Oracle server and fetches metrics and properties every minute. As Environment ActiveGate is installed in your local environment, this strengthens the security and minimizes the traffic load in your network. Note that the main purpose of the Cluster ActiveGate is the OneAgent traffic routing.

Do I need to install OneAgent on Oracle host?
No, but we recommend to do it as it gives you single pane of glass view onto your database performance. The Database insights data will be associated with the Oracle processes. The host and network metric, the log monitoring data will be integrated with the Oracle native metrics.