Setup Oracle Database monitoring alarms and notifications in minutes

With just a few clicks, you can set up your mission-critical alarms and notifications for Oracle Databases using the (OCI) Database Management service.

You don’t have to wait on IT or be a monitoring expert because you can now easily adopt and use Oracle-recommended alarms using a standardized set of rules, thresholds, and conditions, to monitor your databases. Using Oracle recommended alarm and notification configurations you can check for adherence to database best practices and detect potential issues and deviations from recommended (gold standard) configurations. Using this functionality also provides proactive monitoring to ensure that databases are operating efficiently, securely, and in alignment with Oracle Database monitoring best practices.

These capabilities in the OCI Database Management service make what was once a manual process now a breeze:

• Predefined alarm definitions and thresholds: This includes a list of predefined in-context alarm definitions and thresholds based on recognized best practices for Oracle Database management, which contain a specific set of metrics for a specific purpose.
• Customization capability: While the contextual alarm definition provides a standard set of rules, it also enables customization to meet the specific needs and requirements of the Database Administrator, DevOps, or the organization. Using this feature, administrators can adjust thresholds or rules based on their unique environment.
• Fleet level configuration: Using alarm definitions, you can standardize monitoring settings across your enterprise by specifying the monitoring settings once and applying them to other database targets. You can save, edit, and apply these configurations across one or more databases or group of databases within a compartment.
• Alarm thresholds: Each rule in the definition is associated with a severity level, such as critical, warning, or informational. This helps prioritize responses and actions based on the severity of the issue detected.
• Notification mechanisms: The alarm definitions workflow allows you to specify how alerts are to be delivered to the appropriate personnel or monitoring systems. Common notification mechanisms include the topics that you subscribed to. A topic is an OCI Notifications service resource, which acts as a communication channel for sending messages to its subscriptions (endpoints) such as email and text messages.

Getting started 

In the OCI console, navigate to Observability & Management, Database Management, and on the Fleet summary page, click the name of your database to go to the Managed database details page. You can find Alarm definitions listed in the Resources section under Administration.

Navigaton notes:

• Display the list of alarm definitions created for a specific database. If you don’t have any created, then use the options available in the Create menu to create Oracle-recommended alarms or create a custom alarm definition. 
• Click Recommended alarms and a panel is displayed, create the Oracle-recommended alarm definition. This workflow combines creating the alarm or event rule and notifications on a single screen. The values for the Oracle-recommended alarms are filled in automatically. This includes the alarm name, severity, interval, and threshold, which specifies when the alarm is triggered. 
• Existing topic - select an existing topic to show all the destinations configured for that topic, or create one => Topic selection - choose an existing topic to show all the destinations configured for that topic, or create one.
• Oracle-recommended alarms scenario - To monitor the tablespace storage space in your database use the Oracle-recommended Tablespace space utilization (%) – Critical and Tablespace space utilization (%) – Warning alarms. These alarms use the  “StorageUtilizationByTablespace” metric and you can use the preconfigured alarm values or click the Actions icon ( ) for the alarm and select Edit threshold to edit the threshold and other values. An alarm is triggered and you receive a notification when the space used is greater than or equal to the defined threshold value. In addition, when using tablespace alarms, you have the advantage of tracking the tablespace growth for individual tablespaces using the Split notifications per metric stream option in the Edit alarm panel. This option is selected by default for the tablespace alarms and you will be notified when the metric status for each tablespace changes. This helps in proactively managing disk space for tablespaces by notifying when available space is running low based on the thresholds defined.
• Click Custom alarm to access the complete set of alarm creation options in the OCI Monitoring service if the recommended alarms are not sufficient.
• Clone an alarm definition to apply an existing configuration across one or more databases. Select a desired alarm configuration and when you click the Clone button, a panel is displayed, allowing you to perform the clone operation. In the Clone alarms panel, select the Clone to compartment option, and select a compartment to clone the alarm, and apply the configuration to all the databases in the compartment.
• Clone alarms panel - select the Clone to selected database option, select the databases to clone the alarm, and apply the configuration to the selected databases.
• Delete the created alarm definitions, if required, by selecting the alarms and clicking the Delete button.

Summary

The alarm definitions feature eases the process of creating and managing alarms to monitor Oracle Databases. It enables you to create Oracle-recommended alarms by making use of the standardized set of rules and thresholds, across multiple databases.

Additional Resources

• Hands-on lab: Get Started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Database Management
• Database Management Videos
• Database Management Blogs
• Database Management Technical Content