Morning all - is there a difference between what SAM offers for Oracle monitoring and what DPM-Oracle (SE) offers?
I'm comparing the two articles but I'm not enough of a DBA to know the buzzwords
Oracle Database.apm-template
Monitoring for Oracle – Database Performance Monitoring Tool | SolarWinds
thx
Short answer: Yes. It's not exactly night-and-day difference, more like the first bright rays of morning sunshine (SAM) compared to the full-on warmth and glory of the sun mid-day (DPA).
SAM will give you a lot of insight on the server, hardware, network, etc and also some info on how the DB is running via an ODBC-based connection.
Meanwhile, DPA will give you some insight into the hardware, network, etc but where it shines (#SeeWhatIDidThere) is telling you how the database is truly performing, and where you should start looking to make improvements or fixes should something turn rotten in denmark.
To see the difference, jump over the the Orion demo (demo.solarwinds.com) and the DPA demo (https://database.demo.solarwinds.com/iwc/main.iwc )
I like to say that SAM is the tachometer - it tells you how the engine is behaving (in this case the Database Management System [DBMS]).
And that DPA is the speedometer - it tells you how the car is performing (how quickly it's doing things).
I shamelessly stole this analogy from sqlrockstar and a session we recorded together years ago.
Each is important in its own right. If you have a high rpms and low speed, then you will blow your engine getting from place A to place B. In the technology side, you'll have a server that is working too hard and your database performance is bad.
The ideal is high speed (great performance) and low RPMs (good health). It's a balancing act and it really depends on what you (or your teams) are trying to monitor. I like both because it's an easy way to determine if you have bad "database" performance because the server is taxed or if you have horrible queries/tables/indexes.
Gentlemen - thank you both
