Monitoring Oracle Database Performance with Grafana – Part II

This the second part of a blog post on using the Grafana graphing tool to create an Oracle database performance dashboard for monitoring host and database performance in real time.

In the previous blog post I created a process to read key metrics from Oracle and insert them into a PostgreSQL database. This intermediate step was necessary as the free edition of Grafana does not include the connector to read directly from Oracle.

Once the metrics were loaded into a PostgreSQL table, a second process calculated deltas for those Oracle metrics that are cumulative. The results were then read by Grafana to show host performance and also report on the number of connected Swingbench users.

In this blog post I am going to expand on that and add IO metrics to track read and write IOPs and also throughput.

There is a video for this blog

As before, all code is available from my GitHub repository.

If you have not read Part I, you can find it here

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Monitoring Oracle Database Performance with Grafana – Part I

In a previous blog post I explored how we can use Oracle’s rich V$ views to monitor CPU utilization on the host on which our database is running, as well as the IO generated by all nodes of the database.

Numbers are great, but it would be even better to see the loads represented graphically on a dashboard for an immediate read on how the database and the underlying infrastructure is handling the workload.

In this blog post I will use the Grafana visualization package to create a simple performance dashboard for our Oracle database.

There is a video for this blog

All code is available on GitHub

If you are looking for Part II, you can find it here
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Refresh a storage snapshot of an Oracle 19c RAC database using ASM diskgroups with Dell PowerMax.

In this post I am going to explore refreshing a storage snapshot of an Oracle 19c RAC database created on a Dell PowerMax storage array.

This post is a companion to the video Dell PowerMax – Refresh a storage snapshot of Oracle RAC database. and a follow on from the blog post Create a storage snapshot of an Oracle 19c RAC database using ASM diskgroups with Dell PowerMax.

This blog post assumes some basic knowledge of PowerMax storage concepts. If you need a basic introduction please check out my PowerMax basics video.

These examples will use the Solutions Enabler command line method of managing the PowerMax, unlike the video which uses the Unisphere graphical interface.

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Create Oracle ASM diskgroups with Dell PowerMax and PowerPath

In this post I am going to explore adding a new ASM diskgroup to an Oracle 19c RAC using PowerMax storage.

We will follow best practices as laid out in H17390 Deployment Best Practices Guide for Oracle with Powermax. This post is a companion to the video Create Oracle ASM diskgroups with Dell PowerMax and PowerPath.

This blog post assumes some basic knowledge of PowerMax storage concepts. If you need a basic introduction please check out my PowerMax basics video.

These examples will use the Solutions Enabler command line method of managing the PowerMax, unlike the video which uses the Unisphere graphical interface.

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Mounting and Opening an Oracle database created with a thin clone snapshot on Powerstore

In my last blog post I created a thin clone of my Swingbench database on my Oracle1 server, and mounted that thin clone to my Oracle2 server.

I also renamed the cloned ASM diskgroups SWINGDATA and FRA, to CLONESWINGDATA and CLONEFRA, as I already had ASM diskgroups with those names on Oracle2 already. As a final step I renamed the individual ASM disks within each of the cloned ASM diskgroups.

In this blog post I am going to mount and open the clone on Oracle2.

Note: There is a video for this post
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Creating a Storage Snapshot of an Oracle database using Dell Powerstore

Storage level snapshot are an incredibly fast and space efficient method to create usable clones of an Oracle database. In this post we’ll create a storage-level snapshot of a Oracle database using a Dell Powerstore storage array. Our database spans two ASM diskgroups, and will be mounted to a second server.

Note: There is a video of this post.
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Create ASM diskgroups with Dell Powerstore

I recently got an opportunity to do some testing with a Dell Powerstore 5000T all-flash storage array, so I thought I would share some of the notes I made during my testing, for the benefit of any DBAs who might be using one to deliver ASM disks to their Oracle databases.

This will be part of a series of posts that focus on the management of Oracle and ASM with Powerstore, so consider this post as a foundational topic. Nothing especially earth shattering, but some solid points nonetheless.

Oh, and there’s a video too

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