You have your Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure set up and running perfectly fine, but you feel something is still missing! You are probably wondering how will I know if there is an issue with my system? How will I know if operations is working on it? How will I know when an issue with my system was resolved? Or how will I know when my password or certificates are about to expire or expired? Even though Autonomous Database is a fully managed service, there are certain activities such as admin password reset or certificate rotation you are responsible for. And then there are certain system events that do not require action from you, but you still need to know. Failure to act on some of these events in a timely manner can have a major impact on your database or applications. Autonomous Database brings to you a host of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Events that help you identify such critical events and proactively take action to maintain a highly available system.

OCI Events are structured messages that indicate changes in resources. These events enable you to create automation based on the state changes of resources throughout your tenancy. You can deliver events to OCI services such as Notifications, Streaming and Functions with a rule. I will not dive deep into OCI Events service here as the purpose of this blog is to highlight the important Autonomous Database Dedicated events that you should subscribe to. You can learn more about OCI Events here.

OCI Events for ADB-D and ADB-C@C are clubbed under five resources.

  • Exadata Infrastructure / Cloud Exadata Infrastructure Event Types
  • Autonomous VM Cluster / Autonomous Cloud VM Cluster Event Types
  • Autonomous Container Database Event Types
  • Autonomous Database Event Types
  • Autonomous Data Guard Event Types

Exadata Infrastructure and Autonomous VM Cluster Event Types are applicable to ADB-C@C, while Exadata Cloud Infrastructure and Autonomous Cloud VM Cluster Event Types are applicable to ADB-D. Autonomous Container Database, Autonomous Database and Autonomous Data Guard Event Types are common for both ADB-D and ADB-C@C. Based on your roles and responsibilities, you may have to subscribe to all the resources or some of them. We recommend that fleet administrators subscribe to Exadata Infrastructure, Autonomous VM Cluster and Autonomous Container Database Event Types, and developers and DBAs subscribe to Autonomous Database Event Types. ADB-D emits over 100 OCI events, do you need to subscribe to all the events? It depends.

All ADB-D Events fall under two categories.

  • Events that are published in response to an OCI API call
  • Events that are published because of a state change in your database for reasons other than an API call

When you make an ADB-D API call, the service publishes a BEGIN event for that call and when the workflow completes or fails, an END event is published. The event body has all the details needed to identify the resource and end result of the API call. Most ADB-D events are related to OCI API calls and depending on what you are trying to achieve, you could subscribe to a specific set of events. For example, I could subscribe to Create Autonomous VM Cluster End event to trigger a function that creates an ACD in that AVMC. Or I could get a notification to initiate my next steps immediately after the resource is created instead of waiting and staring at the console.

ADB-D service also emits a set of generic events, Information, Warning and Critical, for each of the five ADB-D resources. Critical events are published when your system is already impacted and may require immediate attention, warning events are published when the system is still functional but may require your attention to prevent it from turning critical and Information events share the information you should be aware of. We recommended that you subscribe to Warning and Critical events for ADB-D resources depending on your role. Critical events could range from admin password expiry to SSL certificate expiry, while warning events are reminders to reset passwords or rotate SSL certificates before they expire. All these generic events have operations-specific sub-events that are triggered when ADB-D operations have identified an issue with your system and resolved it.

We have a wide range of critical and warning events published for each resource and the list is ever-growing. Learn more about all these events here – ADB-D and ADB-C@C.

Summary

OCI Events are structured messages that indicate changes in resources. These events enable you to create automation based on the state changes of resources throughout your tenancy. ADB-D emits OCI events in response to OCI API calls or a system state change caused by other reasons. Customers could subscribe to OCI API call-based events on a need basis, but we recommend that customers subscribe to critical and warning events for ADB-D resources based on your role. Fleet administrators are recommended to subscribe to Warning and Critical events for Exadata Infrastructure, Autonomous VM Cluster and Autonomous Container Database resources, and developers and DBAs subscribe to Warning and Critical events for Autonomous Database. Taking proactive action on these events is key to having a highly available system.

Learn more about Autonomous Database here.