Exadata: Oracle Enterprise Manager shows Management Server is DOWN but ping shows SUCCESS

With MOS document "EXADATA:OEM errors MS Status is DOWN and Ping Status is SUCCESS" from note ID 2112971.1 we learn that in Exadata Cell server software 12.1.2.2.0 the ipconf utility restarts the Management Server and that since ipconf runs with Exachk the MS gets restarts every time you run Exachk!  Seems like a problem huh?  The good news is that cellsrv does not actually go down, so there is no service interruption, but this is something you may need to know for your next patch application!

Weekend Learning: Whitepaper on Exadata monitoring with Enterprise Manager

Do not miss this whitepaper on Monitoring Exadata Storage Server Grids with Enterprise Manager from the Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) team which has the entire step by step process and all the SQL you need to set up all of the conditions you need to alert on!

Weekend Learning: OEM 12c FAQ for Exadata Virtualized Database Machine

If you are running a virtualized Exadata installation, and using OEM to monitor your systems, do not miss out on document ID 1967758.1 for the MOS article "Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Exadata Management and Virtualized Exadata Database Machine FAQ" which details what versions are compatible with each other and how you need to be configuring the agent too!

EM: Ops Center shuts down every day around the same time

Sometimes we get abstract lessons which we can apply, and the MOS article "The Enterprise Manager Ops Center Node is Shutting Down automatically approximatively at the same time of the day" from note ID 2026395.1 has that kind of lesson for us where our automation might get away from us if we let it!

OEM: Using JVM Diagnostics for stuck threads

A few months ago I posted about JVM Diagnostics in OEM to tune JVMs and heap size, but did you know that it can be used to diagnose stuck threads as well?  This article was really in depth and had a lot of great visuals to explain what was being described, so if you are interested in finding out how to use this or if you want to license the option, click on the link and take a gander.

Weekend Learning: Deploying OEM 12c plugins

Do you want to learn a bit more outside of the Support realm?  Visit My Oracle Support document "EM 12c: How to Deploy the Latest Database Plugin to the OMS / Agent ?" via article ID 1388143.1 to pick up something new tonight with this article that goes step by step with a good number of screenshots to help reinforce the instructions!

Weekend Learning: OEM for MySQL

Were you aware that you can leverage your current Oracle Enterprise Manager application to not only monitor Oracle DB products, but now MySQL DB products as well?  I had no idea either!  Are you in a "mixed" shop with both of these technologies?  Well now it looks like you have an option to consolidate the monitoring of them in just one place!

Configuring notifications in OEM Grid Control

Hot on the heels of my article the other day, about opatch not applying to a RAC instance correctly, is another DBA focused document but there is a reason for that!  How do we get better at Support?  Learning about the system, and what tools are available to help us be more proactive are some great ways to advance your skills!  The document "How To Configure Notification Rules in Enterprise Manager Grid Control" located in My Oracle Support via note ID 429422.1 fits in both of those buckets!  Not only do we learn about OEM, but we learn what is important from Oracle's perspective to monitor about our systems!

Weekend Learning: OEM Patching 101

As some of us recover from turkey induced comas, let me share with you a post from Courtney Llamas from the Oracle OEM blog about patching.  Maybe being in a support type role, you may not have to support OEM, but there is a chance you have some level of access in the tool so you may want to know more about patching for it.  Not using OEM?  You might find this post useful with the breakdown she gives, and think about how it can apply to the other systems you support and if you could write such a concise and accurate patch strategy at your shop.

Learn more about JVMs by tuning with JVM Diagnostics

I think we have all been there.  Garbage Collection (GC) for Java Virtual Machines are chewing up your server processing power and once they are done with the server they need to be rebooted.  Instead of a perpetual "throw memory at it" type of solution, take a gander at this post from Oracle.  Were you aware that the JVMD (Java Virtual Machine Diagnostics) tool was part of Oracle Enterprise Manager which is licensed with several other Management Packs?  Is this already in your environment, licensed, and just sitting there gathering dust?  What if you cannot use the tool?  Read the post anyways, and learn about things like "Eden space" or different algorithms to use for your GC!

Converting cron jobs to EM jobs

Have you ever been frustrated with how little configuration there is for cron/crontab jobs?  Well boy are you in luck!  Check out this article from Oracle's Enterprise Manager blog for a great how-to guide for converting your old cron jobs from simple lines in the crontab to complex entries in the EM Job Activities.  This is particularly useful for getting cron jobs to throw out alerts when something is going wrong, and helps take you to the next level of supporting your applications.

Weekend Learning: Using ASH Analytics in EM12c

Have you used Enterprise Manager 12c yet to drill into ASH analytic data?  If you have not had the chance, I would visit the page Kellyn Pot'vin shared via Twitter tonight where she uses EM12c to identify a negative trend and then dive into the ASH data to figure out what is going on!  This was a great article where she gives us the entire "train of thought" plus screenshots for every event so we can duplicate her efforts when we have our own problems!

Adding OEM notifications for file generation

Catching up some on older posts out there, and one from Pythian caught my eye on OEM notifications about generated trace files!  It introduced me to GV$DIAG tables which I had not known about before, and I wonder about the further application beyond counting the files and being able to do some space measurements on the files.

12c: Bypassing EM to turn off metric thresholds

File this one under the heading "not quite sure why this exists" as the article "How Disable Database Time Spent Waiting (%) At Database Level" on MOS with note 1629021.1 clearly explains the commands to turn the thresholds off for several different types of wait classes, but I do not understand WHY this is an option, required, or even suggested.  Is there a bug in the 12c EM which requires this to be completed "by hand"?  If there was a problem, I could understand turning off some threshold alerting but this seems completely backwards to anybody wanting to be proactive.

EBS ATG webinar: Advanced EBS management with OEM

In less than 24 hours, there will be a webinar by the ATG team on advanced EBS management using the OEM tool with a focus on 12c and R12.2.  Visit the page here to get all the details and sign up for what looks to be a very useful webinar.  Looks like it will be so useful that I decided to post during the day *gasp* in order to give you as much advance notice about this one!  :}

Keeping Exadata nodes maintained

From an interesting article I ran across on LinkedIn, Mike Chafin gives a step by step for how to create disk monitoring for Exadata Compute node disks with Enterprise Manager.  I need to get this over to our DBAs as they are the primary users of EM in our shop, since we could always use more alerting and Mike's article includes that as well for us!

Jonathan Lewis: v$lock and OEM

Jonathan Lewis introduces us to a problem with the performance of the v$lock table with OEM, the v$resource table, and how we can gather stats on individual x$ tables to increase performance.  I thought this was a good read because a. we might encounter this in the future since we're on 11.2.0.2 and b. it's yet another good example of how to identify performance issues that may be small in nature but could have a large effect on your system.  From a few of the posts over the past week, you can see that I find the prospect of digging deeper into the system very interesting and something I'm looking forward to!

Getting alerts from OEM 12c

A through article detailing how to set up alerts, adding notifications and rules, with a link to a whitepaper PDF on how to implement this for an enterprise situation.  Well worth the read!