What is OS Watcher Utility and How to use it for Database Troubleshooting ?

What is OS Watcher Utility and How to use it for Database Troubleshooting ?

OS Watcher (OSWatcher) is a tool to help DBA's to trouble shoot Database performance, Cluster reboot, node eviction, DB server reboot, DB instance Crash related issues and many more.

As we know, OS stats like top, mpstat, netstat plays an important role in Database trouble shooting but there is no way to keep historical date for these stats. Here, OS Watcher is the only rescue for Database Administrator. Suppose Yesterday, There was some performance issue on Database Node but you were not aware about that and when you know that the issue was resolved itself.

Now, DBA can get Database related stats from AWR reports but not OS related stats for last day, To overcome this challenge Oracle introduce OS Watcher utility, which collects OS stats data at a frequency of five minutes and keep it for seven days (default settings). So Now, DBA need not to worry about historical OS stats.

To Trouble shoot Database performance related issues AWR, ADDM and OS Watcher logs are the first place to start for a Remote DBA. Where as for Cluster reboot, node eviction, DB server reboot Alter log files, OS Watcher and System messages (/var/log/messages) plays an important role.


Example 1: This would start the tool and collect data at default 30 second intervals and log the last 48 hours of data to archive files.

./startOSWbb.sh

Example 2: This would start the tool and collect data at 60 second intervals and log the last 10 hours of data to archive files and automatically compress the files.
./startOSWbb.sh 60 10 gzip

Example 3: This would start the tool and collect data at 60 second intervals and log the last 10 hours of data to archive files, compress the files and set the archive directory to a non-default location.

./startOSWbb.sh 60 10 gzip /u02/tools/oswbb/archive

Example 4: This would start the tool and collect data at 60 second intervals and log the last 48 hours of data to archive files, NOT compress the files and set the archive directory to a non-default location.

./startOSWbb.sh 60 48 NONE /u02/tools/oswbb/archive

Example 5: This would start the tool, put the process in the background, enable to the tool to continue running after the session has been terminated, collect data at 60 second intervals, and log the last 10 hours of data to archive files.

nohup ./startOSWbb.sh 60 10 &

Note:
OSW will keep running until stop/crash and will keep data for last 72 hours only. Data automatically compress after 72 hours.

Below files are created:

[root@mqm ~]# ls -ltr /u01/share/oswbb/archive
total 40
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswvmstat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswtop
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswslabinfo
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswps
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswprvtnet
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswnetstat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswmpstat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswmeminfo
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswiostat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 02:49 oswifconfig