Configuration of Metrics and Policies in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 juli 2007

Configuration of Metrics in Oracle Putting it all in action

Enterprise Manager First we start creating a spreadsheet to put all
info together.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR2
The spreadsheet could contain the following
Monitoring targets using OEM heavily leans on columns:
Metrics and Policies. As you must have
noticed, after installation of Oracle Enterprise • Metric
Manager Hundreds of metrics and polices are • Business risk
installed. These metrics and policies will most • Business impact
probably start generating tons of alerts and at • User action
the end of the day you might end up with an • Consecutive Number of Occurrences
EM console indicating many target alerts and Preceding Notification
policy violations. • Warning threshold
• Critical threshold
This paper will focus on the configuration of • Collection schedule
metrics by using monitoring templates.
Of course you can add other columns, if that
As seen in many organisations it proves to be makes sense for your specific needs.
pretty difficult to get things organized. Which
metric is important to be monitored and what
values make sense as warning and critical
threshold?

When trying to answer these questions, one

should start asking himself for each metric:

• What risk is there for the continuity of

services when this metric’s warning or
critical thresholds are met and an alert is
generated?
• What should be the reaction of the DBA
staff if a warning or critical alert is
generated?
If we are unable to specify such a reaction, Take a closer look to the spreadsheet
it does not make sense to monitor this Let’s see how we are going to use the
metric, because what to do if.? spreadsheet.
• More specifically you would also want to
know: what are the right values for warning Metric
and critical thresholds? The Name of the metric.
Example: “Data Block Corruption Error Stack”
To make sure what metrics you should ask
these questions for, start figuring out what Business risk
types of targets are you monitoring? What risk is there for the continuity of services
Hosts, Database Instances, Clusters, Cluster when this metric’s warning or critical thresholds
Databases, Listeners, Agents, OC4J, are met and an alert is generated?
BPEL_Process_Manager etc. Example: “Loss of business data”

For each of these target types we will create Business impact

monitoring templates. What impact does this risk has for the
business?
Example: “High”

Pagina 1 van 2
Configuration of Metrics and Policies in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 juli 2007

User action In order to apply all metric thresholds to you

What should be the next thing to do for the targets, you should apply the monitoring
DBA? templates to these targets.
Example: “Consider database or tablespace
recovery.”

Consecutive umber of Occurrences

Preceding otification
After how many violations should an alert be
triggered?
Example: When you like to be alerted at the
moment CPU usage starts exceeding 80%, it
might be wise to do this after the CPU usage
exceeds 80% for 3 consecutive occurrences.
As on a busy production system high CPU
usage can occur, this might indicate a
structural problem when occurring for 15
minutes.

Warning and critical thresholds

Here you will specify the threshold values for
the warning and critical alert level.

Creating templates
After finishing the analysis of metrics in you
spreadsheet, the next thing to do would be
creating the monitoring templates.
Create standard templates for each target type
that needs to be monitored. Create customized
templates for customer / project specific
situations. These customized templates should
only contain metric threshold settings that are
different from the threshold settings in the
standard templates.
So you might end up with something like:

• CT-Cluster-P0022
• CT-Cluster-P0045
• CT-Single-Database-Instance-CUST32

• ST-Agent
• ST-Cluster
• ST-Cluster-Database
• ST-Cluster-Instance
• ST-Host
• ST-Listener Copyright © 2007
• ST-Single-Database-Instance Rob Zoeteweij
E-mail: r.zoeteweij@planet.nl
This example shows 3 customized templates, Blog:
of which 2 are project and 1 is customer http://mcbobsstruggle.typepad.com/oracle_
specific and 7 standard templates. enterprise_manager/

Applying templates to targets

Pagina 2 van 2