Month: October 2019

OEM 13c Database Plugin 13.3.2 Caveat

I have done some testing on the OEM 13c DB Plugin 13.3.2 (PG) for the last several months. I highlighted some of the changes in this new version in a previous post:

Click Here!

During the last Dallas Oracle User Group (DOUG) conference I got couple of questions though. I will try to answer them as best as possible.

  • OEM 13c Top Activity page has been deprecated

I don’t know the reason why, but is a fact. Oracle is moving towards getting rid of the Top Activity page and replacing this with ASH analytics. As I keep mentioning… we are so used to Top Activity page and this will be a shocking factor for users.

We know that Internet browsers such Chrome, IE or Firefox will no longer support Adobe Flash starting next year. Oracle is now using JET instead of Flash. But the Top Activity page was solely using Flash.

There’s a trick though. Top Activity link will show at the end of the Performance Home page. So you can still access it (while your browser permits it).

  • ASH Analytics can’t be used for our monitoring screens

This was a really good question. There are many companies that have big screens in their command centers to monitor mission critical databases. The Top Activity page is always shown in those screens and is really handful by having a quick glance on the DB’s performance.

Top Activity page will refresh every 15 seconds but the highlighted time frame (5 minutes) always moves to the very end. This means that we only monitor the last 5 minutes every single time. We notices a different behavior with ASH analytics though.

When ASH analytics refreshes, the highlighted time frame won’t move to the very end. This means that we are only monitoring the same 5 minutes (static). See the picture below taken from my lab running 13.2 version:

ASH Analytics EM 13.2 version

I confirmed this behavior in 12c, 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3 versions of the DB Plugin. But there are good news. This didn’t happen in the latest 13.3 PG version using JET. The highlighted time frame always moves to the very end thus showing information of the last 5 minutes every time.

This is another reason to upgrade to the latest version of EM.

  • You can only use DB 19c as a repository if you are using the latest DB plugin

Yes. OEM 13c PG was released with full 19c support. So, the best thing to do is to upgrade to 13c PG version if you want to monitor or use 19c as your DB repository.

Hope this helps to address your questions.

Thanks,
Alfredo

The Strange Case Of A Missing Agent Gold Image

If you are running Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 13c, you should (must) be using Agent Gold Images (GI). They provide an easy way to manage the lifecycle of you OEM agents from a fancy dashboard.

The problem came while removing a Gold Image Versions in OEM 13.3PG. Guess what? The whole Gold Image disappeared!!!

This is not the expected behavior for this. The point here is that there were agents still subscribed to the GI. So even trying to create a new GI won’t allow us to subscribe those agents as they were still subscribed to the GI that was missing.

Using some Sherlock Holmes’ skills found that the GI was in fact still present in the OMR tables. You can use the query below to see all the GI currently living in your system.

SELECT image_name FROM MGMT$EM_GAI_ENTITIES;

What about the agents still subscribed to this GI?

SELECT * from EM_GI_AGENT_SUBSCRIBE WHERE gold_image_series='<GI Name>';

OK, so there should be something wrong here. After working with Oracle Support they found the issue and provided a patch. Please refer to Patch 28817766.

Apply this patch on top of your OEM 13.3 PG and you should see the GI again. If you are not able to see the GI, then create a new one with the same old name. Everything should look fine after that.

Happy patching!
Alfredo