Oracle SNMP Support Reference Guide
Benefits of Oracle SNMP Support
The primary benefits of Oracle SNMP Support include the following:
- The monitoring of key Oracle products is quickly integrated into any management framework based upon SNMP.
- These Oracle products are located, identified, and monitored in real time across enterprise networks of any size.
- Administrators see standard Oracle icons that represent Oracle products in a network map. This map is dynamically customizable. In fact, administrators can define and customize various network maps for different purposes.
- Administrators see the current status of Oracle products, as shown by several status variables that are defined for each product in a management information base (MIB), or they can select which elements to view on the basis of their status.
- Administrators can anticipate exceptional conditions by defining thresholds and alerts, to respond to special situations as soon as they occur or to enable automatic responses.
- Administrators can more readily determine key characteristics of Oracle objects, such as database size, number of users, and activity level.
- Administrators can store and analyze historical data that has been obtained through SNMP.
- Providers of management applications can easily build customized solutions for Oracle customers because SNMP is an open standard.
Strictly speaking, Oracle SNMP Support is intended more for monitoring Oracle products than for managing them. Oracle SNMP Support is invaluable for tracking the status of an entire network of Oracle applications -- first, to verify normal operations, and second, to spot and react to potential problems as soon as they are detected. However, for purposes of investigating and ameliorating some problems, other Oracle tools such as Oracle Server Manager may be more appropriate. This is because Oracle SNMP Support is designed to query status, but not to change system parameters, whereas other tools are designed to set or tune system parameters. Oracle does not support using SNMP to change, as opposed to query, system parameters primarily because the security that SNMP currently can provide is not considered adequate.