Using Glance to see Oracle process usage

With a little configuration Glance can be made to show oracle process usage where the processes are grouped by SID or by user processes or even by applications such as agent usage. This is based on HPUX experience and whilst I know there are Glance ports for other platforms I do not know if they contain the same functionality. 

Using Glance select A (for Application) and you see how the applications have been grouped

Then S and select 2 which shows the breakdown of the background processes we have associated with the SID  PGSAWM1A

If we then want to see how many user processes are connected to that SID we select option 5 from the previous screen

We are using various versions of Glance all around the version 4.73 and the functionality seems to work in them all. The key to getting this to work is creating an applications file. Rules are held in a flat file(/var/opt/perf/parm) that can only be modified by the root user. Care should be taken to ensure that the configuration information remains unchanged. Applications are defined as follows

application = <Application Name>
<criteria> = <criteria rules>

Example

application = db_SID1A
file = ora_*SID1A*

In this example an application db_SID1A is defined that consists of all processes matching the file criteria ora_*SID1A*. It is also possible to define a user based criteria (see below) that will consolidate process information based on the owner of the UNIX process.

application = Appworx_User
user = apxprdco

In this example the Appworx_User application consists of all processes owned by the apxprdco user.

As stated above the Application criteria are hierarchical and therefore care needs to be taken to ensure that the application criteria are selective otherwise unexpected results can be obtained.

The file must terminate with a default application (see below) that is already part of the deployed file.

# Note: this generic root user entry should be specified at the end of your
# application definitions, if you choose to keep it, because it will
# pick up all processes owned by root which were not included in preceeding
# application definitions.
application = other_user_root
user = root

Location of diagnostic directories in 11g

Since the advent of 11g and the use of diagnostic_dest there is no requirement to create the bdump/cdump/udump  and other directories required for oracle trace and admin files. Well, that is true if you are happy to accept the default location under $ORACLE_BASE. However the path to the trace area where alert logs and dump files are kept is a long one and I prefer  to use an alias to get there.

In the .profile I set up two aliases to point to the trace areas for ASM and whichever database my current SID is set to

alias diagdest=’cd $ORACLE_BASE/`adrci exec=”show homes” | grep $ORACLE_SID`/trace’

alias diagdestasm=’cd $ORACLE_BASE/`adrci exec=”show homes” | grep ASM`/trace’

I am sure there are other ways of setting a similar alias and I am happy to hear of any that others use