In a recent blog post I explored how to monitor the database hosts’ CPU utilization from inside of the Oracle database using the V$OSSTAT view. Although not as comprehensive as native OS tools, the approach offered a quick and simple method for Oracle DBAs to leverage the existing software installed and established network connectivity to overlay a simple host monitoring layer that could track CPU utilization rates, and possibly identify CPU starvation risk, or over-provisioned database hosts in a manner that is largely platform neutral and works regardless of any hypervisor.

In this post I am going to explore how to use how to monitor database IOPS and storage throughput in close-to-real-time, again using the databases’ interval views. Once again our approach will likely not be as comprehensive as native OS tools, but will offer Oracle DBAs a quick and simple additional method to track the storage performance of their databases. In addition, since the Oracle internal views track only the database IO, and not IO generated from other applications, our DBAs can be confident that the numbers represent what the database has generated and is experiencing, undiluted by peripheral activities.

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