In this blog I want to provide some important steps if you want to monitor Oracle databases running on AWS RDS.
The first step is to have an Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) installation. This can be on-prem or running on EC2. If you need to setup EM in EC2 you can use one of the pre-built images that already contains an Oracle database. You are going to need this database for the EM repository.
One quick example can be the Oracle database 19c image by cloudimg running on Oracle Linux. Just make sure you add enough space in the filesystem so you can also install the EM software.
Once the EC2 instance is up and running, go ahead and patch the Oracle database with the latest RU (RU28 as of today).
Download the Oracle EM 13.5 software from oracle.com and also download the latest RU available (RU27 as of today).
Install EM 13.5 and patch it with RU27. Follow below videos if you need additional guidance on how to install and patch EM.
Next we are going to follow the instructions that RDS has available for the EM agent installation. Remember that because there’s no actual access to the RDS host, we can’t install the EM agent using the traditional way.
Verify all the network pre-reqs so your RDS instance can actually reach your EM installation running on EC2. If you EM is running on-prem then a VPN setup will be required.
Now is time to create an option group once all the network pre-reqs are met. The option group is how we actually ask the RDS console to provide us the option to deploy an EM agent. The option for the option group needs to be OEM_AGENT.
Before you deploy the option group to your RDS instance, you will have to provide information about your EM instance, including:
- EM Host Name
- EM upload port
- EM registration key
Then deploy the option group to your RDS instance.
Once the deployment finishes, you will actually have the EM agent up and running in your RDS instance and showing up in the EM console.
The next step is to discover your DB instance and the listener. Follow below link for the documentation.
Hope this set of steps help you with the monitoring setup of your RDS database with Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Thanks,
Alfredo