Re: Should DBA have access to sar and top?

you should have access to sar reports at least top is a bit CPU intensive.. running it to refresh every 40 secs or so might help
vmstat 5 can give you most of the stats you need, top might help identifying a 'runaway' process.

Good luck w/ office politics.. don't cross-post :)

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004 03:20:02 GMT, Tim Barkley <notmyemail_at_msnn.com> wrote:

>I came to a new shop as a DBA recently and discovered I am not allowed to
>use either sar or top on a Unix server where Oracle database is installed.
>Unix system administrator gave me some explanation why DBA is not allowed
>to have access to sar and top, but to me it sounds ridiculous, to put it
>modestly. I can't see how can one be expected to do serious Oracle
>performance tuning and troubleshooting without those tools. I'm curious if
>any of you ever ran into similar nonsense and how have you handled it.
>Here's what I've was told:
>
>"SAR and Top are system administrator tools and are therefore not required
>by any other users. System performance monitoring is an expressed function
>of the systems administrator. It is clearly stated in our job descriptions
>as being part of our responsibilities. This responsibility is not
>indicated in the job description of DBA's.
>
>Additionally, these tools inflict an overhead of system resources, which
>could compromise the running of a server if not controlled properly. SAR
>especially utilizes a great number of resources (especially if all of the
>parameters are used). Currently TNG is running performance monitoring (SAR
>in the background) and we run performance metrics as well. If other users
>also run these same monitors it would be a gross and unnecessary misuse of
>server resources and undermine the integrity of the system with which we
>are charged to maintain. Systems administrators are responsible for the
>monitoring of all applications on the platform (Oracle, Unicenter, FTP
>etc.) DBA's are responsible for the performance of their own individual
>application and as such may use the dedicated OEM and statsback utilities."
>
>Any comments are appreciated.
>

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We use Oracle 8.1.7.4 on Solaris 2.7 boxes remove NSPAM to email Received on Wed Mar 31 2004 - 15:58:41 CST