Oracle Database Performance Monitoring Tools

When it comes to Oracle database performance monitoring, the process itself is much like the process of monitoring other relational database management systems. Monitoring Oracle involves measuring key metrics that can influence database performance to help maximize Oracle database uptime, keep IT productivity up, and deliver database queries quickly.

The overall purpose of database monitoring, no matter the type of database, is to keep the database itself and your associated resources functioning at the highest level possible. Only then can you ensure your application infrastructure is functional and available to end users.

For example, many key metrics involved in effective Oracle database monitoring are related to query performance. Queries play a critically important role in Oracle database performance monitoring, since they’re the center of database function and performance.

Thorough database monitoring in Oracle should also look at both your software and hardware. As you collect performance data over time, you can better determine baselines for various metrics and identify deviations from the norm that could indicate a problem. With these baseline records, database monitoring can also make it easier to spot exactly where the problem first arose, so you can target root cause in your troubleshooting efforts.

Effective Oracle database monitoring can make it easier for IT administrators and database administrators to conduct faster and more accurate problem resolution processes, which can save organizations time and resources. By quickly remediating and proactively solving performance issues, monitoring Oracle databases can also help you more easily improve the end-user experience. Whether your end users are employees or customers, a better experience can have significant benefits for your organization.

No matter the size of your organization, database monitoring for Oracle is a major endeavor and requires the use of a tool if you want to fully reap the benefits of monitoring efforts. Unlike manual monitoring efforts, Oracle database performance monitoring tools can track performance metrics 24/7, alerting you when your attention is needed and giving you the information you need to remediate issues.

Successful Oracle database monitoring depends on identifying which metrics are most important for understanding performance and how to make sense of them. While queries and monitoring throughput are often considered common Oracle performance metrics, other Oracle database performance metrics can go even deeper into the system and may also be important to track.

Some essential Oracle database performance metrics you should consider monitoring include:

• Under-allocated RAM: Sometimes increasing your RAM (instead of using the much-slower disk access) can increase your database speed. When you don’t have enough RAM allocated to shared_pool_size, db_cache_size, and Aggregate_target, your database will be forced to operate at the speed of physical I/O. Keeping an eye on these metrics can help ensure this doesn’t happen.
• Rows Read/Row Selected Ratio: This ratio tells you how many rows within your database had to be read before there was a return for your specified rows. If the ratio is higher than 20, you may have an issue with your database indexes. Monitoring this metric can save you hours of research in searching for the reasons for a slow database.
• Transaction Log Response Time: Your log response times can impact latency during transactions. This can become a significant problem—especially when it comes to critical transactions. By identifying and addressing slow log response times, you can improve your latency issues.
• Page Cleaning Ratio: The page cleaning metric has become an increasingly important metric, especially for e-commerce pages and online publishers. This ratio gives you insight into your page cleaners, which write your old pages to the disk asynchronously, allowing your new pages to be read into the buffer pool.
• In Memory Sort Ratio: When your database is having issues with speed, this ratio can be an important piece of the puzzle in determining the root cause. The In Memory Sort Ratio tells you how many sorts are being handled on the disk as opposed to in memory. Sorts handled in the tablespace are significantly slower than those in RAM, so if you see more sorts occurring in disk, it may be the reason for your slow speeds.
• Excessive nested loop joins: The unfortunate reality is that iterative loop joins are going to be slow. The best thing you can do is dig into the code to try to find better options than nested loop joins wherever possible.

From running applications to creating reports with business intelligence statistics, databases are often essential to the functioning of any organization. Without monitoring, your Oracle database may start seeing a serious degradation in performance, which can have significant consequences for end users that lead to violations of your service level agreements (SLAs).

To effectively track the many metrics that play an important role when it comes to Oracle database performance, a monitoring solution can help you stay on top of your performance data. If you try to rely on manual monitoring, you may not find the root cause of slow performance until long after it affects end users.

Oracle database performance monitoring tools can help you more easily keep track of key Oracle metrics, including alerting you whenever metrics cross a threshold and indicate potential problems that could lead to performance degradation. This way, you can act fast—before your end users experience a significant issue or lead to broken SLAs.

Oracle database monitoring tools are designed to get you ahead of and quickly solve performance issues by helping quickly you identify and eliminate bottlenecks, improve your application service, and prevent slowdowns. By using an Oracle database performance monitoring tool, you can help more easily ensure issues are caught and resolved before they have a serious impact.

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is designed to help you more easily maintain database performance. DPA is a thorough Oracle database performance monitoring solution designed to help you keep track of key Oracle performance metrics including Rows Read/Row Selected Ratio, Under-Allocated RAM, In Memory Sort Ratio, and more.

The Oracle performance solution in DPA can monitor your database 24/7, alerting you when a metric indicates an issue that demands your attention and can offer actionable insights to help you target root cause of the problem more effectively. DPA can also give you the data and insights you can use to proactively improve Oracle database performance.

With DPA for Oracle database performance monitoring, you can benefit from both real-time and historical monitoring to help you understand why Oracle performance might be suffering right now and why it was suffering before. By combining both real-time and historical performance analysis, DPA can help you understand where your database performance is headed and how the system is trending, empowering you to make changes to help Oracle database performance trend in a positive direction.

When it comes to Oracle database performance monitoring, DPA is built to use machine learning as part of its anomaly detection. As time goes on, the tool learns your database baselines and norms to identify even the smallest deviations from those norms more effectively, which translates into quicker detection and remediation of possible problems that could otherwise have a major impact on Oracle database performance.