This starter kit provides an importable Oracle alert pack for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer. It is intended as a practical starting point for customers who want a baseline set of Oracle alerts without building each custom alert from scratch. DPA supports import and export for alerts, rules, and custom properties, which makes it a good fit for sharing a starter pack like this across environments.
The pack was built around a common Oracle monitoring checklist that includes database status, tablespace usage, FRA usage, block corruption, archive area usage, alert log errors, archive log gap, blocking session count, session limit usage, process limit usage, archiver hung alert log errors, and Data Guard monitoring items such as observer status, failover state, apply lag, and transport lag.
What is included
This starter set includes:
- an Oracle alert assignment rule so the alerts can be targeted to Oracle instances automatically
- custom SQL alerts for the Oracle checks listed above
- separate Data Guard alert definitions so you can enable only the pieces you want
- a basic availability alert alongside the custom Oracle checks
Using alert rules based on database properties such as database type is a standard DPA pattern for reducing manual alert assignment work, especially when you want the alert set to follow newly added instances automatically.
Starter alerts in this pack
The pack includes Oracle alert coverage for:
- Database status
- Tablespace usage
- FRA usage
- Block corruption
- Archive area usage
- Alert log errors
- Archive log gap
- Blocking session count
- Session limit usage
- Process limit usage
- Archiver hung alert log error
- Data Guard observer status
- Data Guard failover occurred
- Data Guard apply lag
- Data Guard transport lag
A few notes before import
This is a starter kit, not a finished monitoring standard. You should review the SQL, thresholds, polling intervals, and Oracle privileges before using it in production.
A few of the checks are straightforward threshold-based Oracle alerts, while others are best treated as event-style alerts based on diagnostic or Data Guard status output. Several similar Oracle examples already exist in THWACK content for things like block corruption, archive destination status, archiver errors, database open mode, Data Guard lag, max sessions, FRA monitoring, and tablespace monitoring.
Importing the starter set
To import the pack into DPA:
- copy the attached starter kit file
- Note: You may need to rename the extension from ".txt" to ".zip" but most browsers will automatically do this for you. to the
- in DPA, go to Options > Import Custom Entities
- select the zip file
- on the Select Entities page, uncheck anything you do not want
- on the Review page, also check the Existing Entities tab for any conflicts before completing the import
Expected use case
This pack is aimed at teams that want a reusable Oracle alert baseline for DPA and prefer to tune from a working starter set rather than create every alert one at a time. It should also help teams keep Oracle monitoring more consistent across test, staging, and production DPA environments, which is one of the main benefits of DPA’s custom entity import/export support.
Feedback
If you try this pack, feedback on threshold tuning, Oracle version differences, RAC behavior, and Data Guard edge cases would be especially helpful. I expect some environments will want to adjust the defaults for lag sensitivity, alert-log matching, and resource-limit percentages based on workload and operational tolerance.
Sources