Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Refe

Monitoring

Monitoring is the process of watching what is happening at a physical level within the database. As a database administrator, you monitor the utilization of scarce resources within the database and instance to ensure that sufficient reserves are available. For most systems, the resources most people are concerned about include memory, storage, disk I/O, and network activity. A number of proprietary Oracle and third-party monitoring utilities will automatically watch activity in the database, record information, and alert you to potential problems.

This section concentrates primarily on memory and storage. These are the areas over which the DBA has the most control. This is not to minimize the importance of disk I/O and network traffic. After all, the whole process of query optimization (described in Chapter 8) involves reducing the amount of disk I/O required to retrieve the rows in the result set. And normally mild-mannered applications can become beasts when they are converted from running on the same machine to running in a distributed environment. However, there are very good tools that allow you to look at disk and network traffic from outside the database environment.