Written by: ilmarkerm

Category: Blog entry

Published: January 17, 2021

For a while now Oracle is using standardised log structure under Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) – this includes database alert.log, listener log, CRS log, ASM log and much more. All this is very valuable information for monitoring.

I’m a fan of using Grafana (using InfluxDB as a data source) for monitoring, since in Grafana it is very easy to create your own customised dashboards and alerts – so lately I’ve ben creating my own monitoring agents to gather send Oracle monitoring information to InfluxDB.

InfluxDB is fast time series database, perfect for storing monitoring data – each record must have timestamp associated and data retention is also natively built in.

Since our Oracle environment is exploding in size, my goal is also to have monitoring tools/agents that figure out what to do themselves, deployed using Ansible. All without any human involvment.

Here is monitoring agent with following high level features:

• Searches for all recently modified alert/log.xml files under ADR base
• Parses newly added log messages for any tags that Oracle itself has added (like component and message level)
• Parses log messages against custom regular expressions to parse out custom information

Code is here:

https://github.com/ilmarkerm/monitoring/blob/main/oracle/adr-log.py

It is expected to run as SystemD service. I currently left in some Ansible tags, since this is how I distribute the agent to all servers (and to make sure people do no just take the code and run it without reading and understanding it).