database monitoring tools - what is your short list of requirements?

What would you say are the essentials for database monitoring?

Here's a list of things I consider important and track closely. These are just *monitor* items. There are several other automated jobs that run against databases, but cannot really be considered as a *monitor* type job.

• Space available on archive log volumes - kick off a backup if % too low and delete logs
• Is database up? - window during which paging occurs varies by database
• Alert log - monitor for ORA-, TNS and 'crash'
• There are monitors to check the database monitors and restart them if necessary. (The biggest problem is on Windows where a service may not start at startup)
• dba_jobs - are any jobs stuck?
• dba_jobs - are any jobs broken?
• rman - check catalog to see if backups are restorable up to yesterday
• rman - do a validate on 2 random databases ( once a month )
• security - monitor for accounts with default password
• security - monitor for accounts that should be locked
• security - monitor for expiring passwords
• storage - are any segments in danger of running out of space?
• performance - gather response time metrics ( db perspective)

Your list is likely highly dependent on the environment: Size of IT shop, number of DBA's, size of company, etc.

If you respond to this thread, please include a little environment information if you can.

Here's ours: we are a small to medium size business, about 30 people in IT altogether, with a single Oracle DBA.

There are about 30 Oracle databases, and about a third of those are for production use by end users, with a fair amount of applications:

SAP, Oracle Apps, Agile PLM are the critical ones, along with a host of smaller apps.

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l