Monitoring Oracle Databases with Opsview

Monitoring Oracle with Opsview

Monday, 30 July 2012 © Opsview Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 2

About
• This ‘how to’ presentation describes how to monitor Oracle databases
using Opsview
• If you don’t already have Opsview installed, visit our website and
download Opsview Core (free), Opsview Pro (30 day trial) or request a trial
to Opsview Enterprise.

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Monday, 30 July 2012 © Opsview Ltd. Commercial in Confidence

Introduction
• In our example scenario, we are testing against “Oracle
Database 11g Express Edition”, however the monitoring
should be uniform across all Oracle database platforms. Our
Opsview server is running on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit, however
this document can be altered to fit RHEL/CentOS/SLES etc and
also 32/64 bit with some slight changes.

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Installation
• Installation of the Oracle monitoring plugin requires
installation of the Oracle “Instant Client”, along with the
“alien” package and the check_oracle_health plugin we will
be using.
• The steps needed are outlined later in this document.

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Installation
• Firstly, we will need to install our “alien” package, which we
will need to convert the Oracle InstantClient files from .rpm to
.deb (if we are installing on Debian/Ubuntu, if we are
installing on CentOS/RHEL for example, we can leave it in the
native .rpm format).
• To do this, run “apt-get install alien”, for example – or if you
prefer, download the offline version and run a “dpkg –I
alien…deb”.

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Installation
• Next, we will need to download the 3 Oracle client files and
install them from the link:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxsoft-082809.html

• The files we need are:

oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm

• However the file names may be slightly different, depending
on version number and architecture (32 vs 64 bit). You may
need to sign up for a www.oracle.com account if you do not
already have one.
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Installation
• Now that we have the 3 RPM’s above, we will need to install
them. On CentOS/RHEL, this is easily done via “rpm --ivh
oracle…rpm”, in the order of “basic”, then “devel”, then
“sqlplus”. If we are installing on Debian/Ubuntu, we will need
to convert the .rpm to .deb using alien and then install, as
below:

sudo alien --to-deb oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm
dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.2-basic_11.2.0.3.0-2_i386.deb
sudo alien --to-deb oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm
dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.2-devel_11.2.0.3.0-2_i386.deb
sudo alien --to-deb oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.i386.rpm
dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.2-devel_11.2.0.3.0-2_i386.deb

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Installation
• Next, we will need to set the bash variables of our user
running the oracle client. To do this, we must edit the
“~.bashrc” file, and add the lines below:

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib

• This points our variables to the correct location. Once set, we
will need to load them into the active config via the command
“source ~/.bashrc”.

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Installation
• 6Next, we will need to download the DBD::Oracle file needed
to run the script. We can get this via the cpan CLI
command, or via the link

http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/P/PY/PYTHIAN/DBD-Oracle-1.44.tar.gz

• Once we have downloaded the file to our Opsview system, we
will need to extract, and then compile, as below:

tar –zxvf DBD-Oracle-1.44.tar.gz
cd DBD-Oracle-1.44
perl MakeFile.PL
make
sudo make install

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Installation
• Now that we have installed DBD::Oracle, we will need to
download and compile the plugin we will be using to monitor
Oracle; called check_oracle_health (current version at writing
is 1.7.3). To do this, we will need to run the commands below:
cd /tmp
wget http://labs.consol.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/check_oracle_health-1.7.3.tar.gz
tar –zxvf check_oracle_health-1.7.3.tar.gz
cd / check_oracle_health-1.7.3
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nagios --with-nagios-user=nagios --with-nagios-
group=nagios --with-perl=/usr/bin/perl --with-statefiles-dir=/tmp
make
sudo make install

• With these commands, we are configuring the plugin with the
full paths to our Perl files, and our nagios files. The
make/make install then compiles the plugin, and
automatically moves it to the plugin directory (located at
/usr/local/nagios/libexec).
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Installation
• We can now test our plugin. First, let’s go to the plugin
directory above; “cd /usr/local/nagios/libexec”. Now we can
run the plugin against our oracle host using a simple tnsping,
as below:

smarsh@demo:/usr/local/nagios/libexec$ ./check_oracle_health --
connect=192.168.12.126 --mode=tnsping
OK - connection established to 192.168.12.126

• Where “--connect=192…” is the location we specify our Oracle
server, and “--mode=” is where we specify what we’d like to
do, in this case a “tnsping”. As above, we should get a “OK –
connection established” message, if not, or we get timeouts,
please check to ensure that the ports are open on the firewall
to allow connectivity.
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Installation
• Now that we have the plugin installed and tested working, we
can begin the simpler task of configuring Opsview to utilize
the plugin.

• Log into your Opsview installation, and click on “SETTINGS ->
ATTRIBUTES” and click on the green “plus icon” in the top
left. We will need to create 2 attributes, a “Oracle User” and
an “Oracle Password”, which are the credentials we will use to
login to the Oracle server.

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Installation
• NB: We could specify these manually in the service check, but
the problem would arise if you wanted to monitor 2 Oracle
servers with different credentials, you would need 2 different
service checks as we hard coded them. This way is much more
elegant. Visit our Opsview Configuration section for more
information on attributes.
• Once we have added our attributes, we should have a screen
as below:

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Installation
• Next, lets go to “SETTINGS -> SERVICE CHECKS”, and then
the green “plus icon” in the top left. In the service check
template, we can now begin to create our new service
checks. In our example, we are going to monitor how
much free space in MB we have in the “SYSTEM”
tablespace, using the command:

“check_oracle_health --connect=$HOSTADDRESS$ --user=%ORAUSER% --
password=%ORAPWD% --name=system --mode=tablespace-free --units=MB”

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Installation
• As you can see, we have entered our new attributes into the
service check. We can populate the service check to our liking,
however the important point at this stage is to choose
“check_oracle_health” in the plugins section, and enter:

“--connect=$HOSTADDRESS$ --user=%ORAUSER% --password=%ORAPWD% --name=system
--mode=tablespace-free --units=MB”

…in the arguments section, so we have a screen as below:

• Click on “submit changes”, and our new service check, in our
example called “Oracle - Tablespace Free”, is created.
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Installation
• Next we need to add our Oracle host and add the new service
check to it. To begin, navigate to “SETTINGS > HOSTS” and
click the green plus icon in the top left.
• As per the standard way, enter the hostname/IP of the Oracle
server in “Primary Hostname/IP”, and the verbose name we
will reference it as, in the “Host Title” name; in our example
we are going to refer to it as “Oracle”.
• Once we have configured the “HOST” tab, we will next need
to move onto the “Monitors” tab, and select our new service
check, as below:

17

Installation
• Finally, we will need to click on the “ATTRIBUTES” tab, and
add 2 new attributes; one for oracle user and one for oracle
password, and populate with the correct details for the oracle
host, as below:

• These values will be pulled into any service check ran against
this host, that references the attributes %ORAPWD%, for
example.
• Click on submit, and our new Oracle host with our new
service checks will be created.
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Installation
• Finally, we will need to apply our changes. To do this, navigate
to “SETTINGS > APPLY CHANGES” and click “reload
configuration”.

• Our new host and service checks will now be active and
running. To view them, navigate to “MONITORING > HOSTS”
and click on your new host, Oracle, to view the service checks.

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Installation
• In our demo environment, we have the below service checks
configured:

• However, there are many more to add and they are all
available if you run the command “./check_oracle_health -h".
Most are simply option changes after “--mode=”, and you add
them exactly the same method as we did in the earlier steps.

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About Opsview
Opsview delivers a single unified view of the health of all your
distributed physical, virtual and hybrid cloud systems.

We give DevOps staff all the tools they need to get their jobs
done faster, easier and for less.

• Opsview Enterprise offers large enterprises (+100 devices) and MSPs a
certified, professionally supported network monitoring solution with enhanced
functionality such as dynamic dashboards and reports

• SMEs looking for feature-rich dashboards to monitor the performance of their on-
premise, virtualized or cloud apps choose Opsview Pro

• Opsview Core is our free, open source monitoring tool - you can test and
customize it how you want

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Monitoring Oracle Databases with Opsview

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