Oracle Management Pack for OpsMgr SCX Agents, Part 4: File System and Process Monitoring
April 29, 2010 7 Comments
While the vast majority of the rules and monitors in the Oracle SCX management pack (part 1, part 2, part 3) that I am working on involve the basic form of a SQL query data source (see part 2) that queries a specific parameter value to evaluate the result, there are two areas of monitoring that required discovery logic a bit more complex: file system monitoring and Oracle process monitoring. I found the challenge of implementing these two categories of monitoring to be engaging, and thought that it might be worth writing a bit about the approaches that I took.
File System Monitoring
Oracle dependencies on file systems could exist in several forms, such as the Flash Recovery Area, Dump space destinations, Data File locations, and log archive destinations. While the OpsMgr cross platform agent provides File System availability and space-monitoring out-of-the-box, I wanted to implement additional space monitoring for the File Systems that an Oracle instance depends on, with custom thresholds and alerting.
In order to achieve this result, I started by creating a class for the Oracle File System. An instance of this class would represent the File System that Oracle depends on. By using the FS name as the key property, if multiple Oracle components used that File System, only a single instance of the class would be discovered. In order to enhance alerting, I also added a set of boolean properties to the File System class that, once discovered, would indicate the nature of the dependency that Oracle has on the File System.
Operating-Quadrant 