It hasn’t been easy trying to classify DatabaseRX.   Is it a monitoring, capacity planning, analysis, reporting, forensics, dashboard, KPIs, delta comparison tool - yes.  Is it a database management console or query tool - no.  As such I’d like to start with a simple area but one that’s easy to get wrong.

Alert Log Scanning

Very few tools do this well out of the box - and those that attempt to perform the task require significant setup or proprietary transport agents.  And to my knowledge with 11gR2 ADR  you still can’t add a syslog host destination for an instance alert log (talk to the folks at TimesTen for this enhancement Oracle).

DatabaseRX has some impressive features for alert log monitoring:

• Transport and consolidation are built in to a periodic passive e-mail send framework.
• Events of interest are rated for severity.
• Pre and post lines are displayed around the alert.
• RegEx style strings can exclude events on an instance-by-instance basis.

To the last point all events are monitored and you add exceptions over time.  While there could be more noise-to-signal in the beginning, you will not miss an unusual but critical new event.

I’ve setup various alert log monitoring systems in the past for RAC/non-RAC databases and what DatabaseRX does exceeds those tools - with far fewer resources.  One personal metric? I log into production hosts fewer times to investigate events and that not only saves time but helps keep the auditors happy.