RE: Oracle Diagnostics Pack

Yes, that's pretty much it, however those 3 tools, particularly ASH and AWR in my opinion, are very nice to have. Whether or not it's worth the cost will be a personal/business decision. Sure, we all got along w/o these tools in the past, and there are ways to implement similar functionality on your own, but that has its pros & cons too so you have to take it all into consideration and decide what's best for your situation. You can get much, maybe even most, of the same information by just running regular statspack snapshots - but there is a lot of extra detail gathered with ASH. I've used the ASH/AWR information several times in the past 9 months since going live on 10g to drill down to the root cause of problems that occurred in the past. ADDM is nice in theory, but it hasn't really proved very useful in real life for me so far - I can't say I've ever actually taken any action based on it's findings. One of my favorite features of AWR is the ability to run a "Compare Periods" report, which basically takes two different statspack reports and runs a delta on them, then provides a nice graphical representation of the statistics that were higher/lower between them. For example, if you're getting slowness complaints from 8-10am today, you can run a comparison of that period today with the same period yesterday, last week, last month, etc. and get a very quick view into what is different between now and then. I also modified the defaults (hourly snapshots retained for 1 week) so that my system takes snapshots every 15 minutes and retains them for 45 days. Sure, it takes some more disk space, but it's well worth it in my opinion.  

Another thing to keep in mind is that when we were talking to Oracle sales, they heavily pushed the Tuning Pack along with the Diagnostics Pack to the point of almost insulting me for wanting one w/o the other. The Diag pack is required for the Tuning pack, but NOT the other way around. I tested the Tuning pack for the free 30 days and for me it wasn't worth the extra $$ so I just licensed the Diag pack, but again - it will be a personal/business decision - just keep in mind that the Diag pack is a very useful and complete tool on its own w/o the Tuning Pack so don't fall for the sales people that tell you it's useless w/o the Tuning pack or "everyone licenses them both together".  

Regards,
Brandon  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of amonte Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 4:11 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Oracle Diagnostics Pack

Hi All

Recently some Oracle Sales came to our company and show us Grid Control. They also mentioned Diagnostics Pack however i am a bit confused about this Pack. It seems like it is made up of ASH, ADDM and AWR. Is that all?

Anyone has used this pack?

TIA Alex

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