Utilize Oracle Provided Health Checks

Over time you will develop custom scripts to monitor database activity for tuning purposes. There are several health checks that you will determine are important based upon your experiences with the database.

Oracle provides a lot of different tools that can also be used to check on settings, server configuration, etc. This post will review a couple of those tools. Note that these tools are updated periodically by Oracle so be sure you have the latest version prior to running.

As with Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM), it is important to review the output to determine if the identified items are really an issue or not. Some expert interpretation is still required when using these tools to determine if the recommendations are valid for your system.

The two Oracle provided health checks covered here are ORAchk and DBSAT. The output will not be discussed in detail because that could account for a whole blog post for each script.

ORAchk
For detail information review My Oracle Support note: ORAchk - Health Checks for the Oracle Stack (Doc ID 1268927.2).

This script will check OS and DB settings. If you are using RAC, Exadata, E-Business Suite, then this script will check settings of those products. This will also run the parallel processing health check

To run this script follow note details. The script will output an HTML file that can be viewed at any time. Note that there are many sections of this report that should be reviewed.

DBSAT
For detail information review My Oracle Support note: Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT) (Doc ID 2138254.1).

This script runs a variety of security checks. Compared to ORAchk, this script is a little more involved to run. It requires a version of Python > 2.6. 

The script is run in two parts: the Collector and the Reporter. The first step collects information about the system with statements run on the database and server. The second part analyzes the data and builds the output. 

These outputs can be encrypted to provide an extra level of security. The output can be large, so take time to review the findings.


In conclusion, even if you have a robust, custom built set of health checks you should incorporate these tools into your review process. Oracle will provide up to date checks that might be outside of the scope of items you review.

Carefully review the output to determine what action items are needed based upon Oracle's findings.