Externally Monitoring the Oracle Database Server

Previously, we elaborately discussed about the wide variety of internal metrics that the eG agent collects from the Oracle server, and how these metrics impact the internal health of the server. However, some administrators might not have access to Oracle servers in their environment, and might hence be unable to install agents on them. These administrators might still want to monitor external health indicators such as the availability and responsiveness of the Oracle server. In order to enable administrators to collect such external metrics in a non-intrusive manner, eG Enterprise offers the External Oracle model (see Figure 1). To use this model, only a single eG external agent is required; this agent sits on a remote host and determines the health of the target Oracle server from an external perspective.

Figure 1 : Layer model of the External Oracle server

The Network test associated with the Network layer runs network-level pings to check whether the Oracle server can be accessed over the network. Besides, the test also looks out for abnormal/very high packet loss, undue network delays, etc. To know more about the Network test, refer to the Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document. The Oracle Service layer is mapped to an Oracle SQL Network test, which emulates a query to the Oracle database server from an external location, to determine the availability of the Oracle server and the speed with which it executes the query. For more details on this test, refer to Oracle SQL Network Test.