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Oracle Performance Tuning and Optimization
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Edward Whalen
ISBN: 067230886x
Publication Date: 04/01/96

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Third-Party Tools

Many third-party tools on the market today are excellent. You should take several factors into consideration when shopping for a third-party monitoring tool: Does it fit into your environment? Does it put an undue burden on the system? Does it monitor all the parameters you need?

Some products are designed with a particular operating system in mind; some support many different environments; still others monitor only Oracle through SQL*Net and consider the server’s operating system irrelevant. Be sure that the monitoring tool you purchase fits into your environment. If possible, get a demonstration version and try it out before you buy.

Make sure that the monitoring tool does not put a heavy load on the server. If configured improperly, some products continually extract data from the Oracle internal performance tables, causing undue contention in the system. Try running a benchmark with and without the performance monitor running. Perhaps the collection interval is too fast and can be reduced. It is not necessary to extract performance information from the system every second when a 30-second interval will do. Reducing the collection interval can significantly reduce the load on the system.


NOTE:  Performance monitoring tools that offer a graphical display showing real-time information can sometimes affect the performance of your system. Tools that graphically update performance information on a per-second basis can be especially hard on the system. Remember: If the tool displays an update every second, it is querying the database at that rate.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself when purchasing a performance monitoring tool. Remember that you will have your own individual needs based on your implementation.

  Does the monitor display all the information you need?
  Do you need OS and RDBMS monitoring or is RDBMS monitoring sufficient?

Most third-party tools available today are sufficient for most needs. Be sure to shop around to find the one that is right for you. I have intentionally avoided making any particular recommendations here because there are many good tools on the market today—and they are continually improving.

By shopping around, you will find a performance monitoring tool that fits into your existing network and management strategy. Don’t judge a tool based on how “pretty” it looks; look at what it monitors and how it gets its information.

The tools available today fall into one of several categories: those that simply monitor parameters and display them on a graphical console, those that alert you when they reach some threshold, and those that are combinations of these first two. The one you need depends on your configuration.

Real-Time Monitors

The real-time monitors usually have a graphical display and provide histograms, or line charts, of various parameters. Real-time monitoring tools are useful for debugging a resource problem or for tuning an application. With these monitors, you can watch the display while you are running to see whether any particular resource is being overused or whether a certain area of the database is experiencing extremely high activity.

I recommend a real-time monitoring tool for debugging applications, trying new tuning parameters, or comparing different applications.

Because of the type of monitoring being done, these performance monitoring tools typically look at Oracle’s V$ tables or maybe even the internal X$ tables. Because this can have an adverse affect on the system’s performance, use these types of tools periodically to check the health of the system or when you are debugging a problem.

Another alternative is to run these tools with a fairly long sample interval (such as 30 seconds or a minute) to reduce the overhead on the system. To monitor the system for a particular problem, consider a threshold monitor. Threshold monitors are used when you don’t think you have any problems; they wake up and alert you of some potential or real problem.


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