Cloud computing provides a dynamic, scalable, and cost-effective platform for any enterprise to rely upon when running their business.  With the ever-expanding IT landscape, infrastructure resources can be spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premises with stringent requirements for performance consistency across applications.   

For Oracle Database@Azure deployments, Azure provides basic monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for Oracle Database service logs, metrics, and events streamed from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). While these basic monitoring features can indicate performance degradation, customers seeking comprehensive end-to-end database and SQL monitoring and management capabilities should consider Oracle’s specialized tools. The OCI Database Management and OCI Ops Insights services offer advanced features to ease the administration of Oracle databases, provide granular monitoring details, and alleviate the overhead of managing infrastructure resources.

OCI Database Management

  • Monitor the key performance and configuration metrics of your fleet of Oracle Databases. You can also compare and analyze database metrics over a selected period.
  • Use Performance Hub for a real-time view of database performance, which enables you to quickly diagnose performance issues.
  • Utilize AWR Explorer to visualize historical performance data from AWR snapshots in easy-to-interpret charts.
  • Leverage the SQL Tuning Advisor, SQL Tuning Sets, SQL Plan Management, Optimizer statistics, and more for performance administration.
  • Use dashboards to visualize, explore and analyze database performance metrics.
Figure 1: The Database Management fleet overview provides detailed resource utilization for databases
Figure 1:  The Database Management fleet overview provides detailed resource utilization for databases

OCI Ops Insights

  • Leverage AutoML capacity planning and forecasting to optimize key resource utilization and prevent resource bottlenecks proactively.
  • Use SQL Insights for fleet-wide and database level SQL performance monitoring to find anomalies in SQL performance or identify SQL degradation trends across the enterprise.
  • Utilize ADDM Spotlight for tactical performance administration of the database fleet by finding most impactful database performance degradation causes and receiving recommendations to effectively mitigate issues.
  • Analyze AWR statistics for database performance, diagnostics, and tuning across a fleet of databases.
  • Create and receive weekly News Reports giving you breakdowns of new utilization highs, big utilization changes, and inventory changes across your fleet of databases, hosts, and Exadata systems.
Figure 2: Ops Insights’s Capacity Planning app helps you avoid resource contention issues to prevent outages
Figure 2. Ops Insights’s Capacity Planning helps avoid resource contention & prevent outages

Database Management provides an in-depth, comprehensive solution to manage database in the cloud.

Utilizing the fleet overview in Database Management allows for quick assessment of the health of your database fleet.  Key performance metrics, short-term resource trends analysis, and alarm details are provided with rich visualizations to minimize efforts in database administration.  Realtime monitoring is also available with Performance Hub providing ASH analytics for granular insights into your database activity, and in the event of degraded performance, you can quickly leverage performance tuning tools to mitigate within the service.  For more details into the capabilities, check out this blog. With advanced monitoring now available in Autonomous Databases, you can utilize these same features for ADBs deployed in Azure.

Ops Insights provides enhanced tools to minimize overhead and reduce effort in managing databases in the cloud

Ops Insights provides enhanced tools to simplify forecasting and capacity planning for your fleet of hosts and databases.  Easily optimize infrastructure utilization to reduce costs by leveraging AutoML driven insights derived from over two years of usage data.  Ops Insights also provides detailed SQL performance insights across your database fleet with SQL Insights.  ADDM Spotlight can pinpoint database performance issues and recommend configuration or performance enhancements to mitigate problems efficiently.  For more details on these features, check out this blog.

Quickly get started with Oracle Database@Azure monitoring

Before proceeding with the onboarding process, consider the following:

  • Network Configuration: Private endpoints are required. You need to update Security Lists or Network Security Groups to enable communication between Database Management (DBM), Ops Insights (OPSI), and Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure (ExaDB-D).
  • Service Entitlements: Database Management Service advanced monitoring capabilities and Ops Insights are not included in the Oracle Database@Azure contract. For detailed SKU information, please refer to the pricing documentation.

Watch these video series to quickly get started onboarding for Database Management and Ops Insights.

Oracle Database@Azure brings the power and flexibility of Oracle’s industry-leading database services into the Azure ecosystem, enabling organizations to leverage a seamless multicloud experience. By implementing robust observability and management capabilities, businesses can ensure that their Oracle databases maintain high performance, reliability, and security across their environments. Leveraging tools like OCI Database Management Service, OCI Ops Insights, and Azure-native monitoring features empowers organizations to effectively monitor, diagnose, and optimize their databases in real-time. This holistic approach to database observability and management simplifies operations, enhances productivity, and enables data-driven decision-making, making it an essential aspect of any multicloud strategy.

Resources