ORAchk replaces EXAchks and RACcheck

The new tool from Oracle ORAchk includes EXAchks and RACcheck functionality and replaces the older tools. It is no longer just a database tool but also runs health check on E-Business Suite Financials, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control repository, GoldenGate and Sun Systems.

Going memory lane, have a look at how Statspack compares with BSTAT/ESTAT. Well, those days are long over. DBAs used to have their own scripts, ran their own healthchecks but some special scripts can still shed some more light on the system health.

One such example is Tanel Poder’s Exadata Snapper.

For details on the ORAchk tool, how to download it, what’s new in ORAchk, read MOS Note 1268927.2. If you do not have access to MOS, here are 2 blog posts that describe the tool quite well:

1. ORAchk Health Checks for the Oracle Stack (including Solaris) by Gerry Haskins

2. ORAchk Health Checks For The Oracle Stack by Levi Pereira

Here is how System Health Score is calculated:

I would recommend glancing first at the ORAchk Known Issues before starting using the tool: MOS 1509746.1

Note that ORAchk’s requirements are as follows:

Supported Platforms:
————–
Linux x86-64* (Enterprise Linux, RedHat and SuSE 9, SuSE 10 and SuSE 11)
Oracle Solaris SPARC (Solaris 10 and 11)
Oracle Solaris x86-64 (Solaris 10 and 11)
AIX **
HPUX**

* 32-bit platforms not supported, no planned support for Linux Itanium
**Requires BASH Shell 3.2 or higher to be installed

Supported Oracle Releases:
————–
10gR2
11gR1
11gR2
12cR1

Still, no Windows…

And, do not aim at a 100% score, you will not get it easily. Points get deducted if you have more than 1 instance on the server:

WARNING OS: Multiple RDBMS instances discovered, observe database consolidation best practices

According to the tool, there is a “risk for shared resource contention leading for instability, performance degradation or scalability problems”. Then it says: “if the database consolidation best practices have already been reviewed and observed then this message can be ignored”.

Not to mention that you might run the report twice in a row and get a different score.

But there is more: ORAchk Collection Manager is a companion application to ORAchk, RACcheck and Exachk. When having lots of systems, auditing them with ORAchk might be a tedious piece of work. ORAchk has long had the ability to upload the results of its audit checks into a database automatically at run time.

However, it was up to us to create a custom front-end to that data for reporting purposes and trend analysis. Now, with ORAchk Collection Manager, Oracle provides this Application Express application to be used as a dashboard in which they can track their ORAchk, RACcheck and Exachk collection data in one easy to use interface.

Download the ORAchk Collection Manager and go through the ORAchk Collection Manager Users Guide for more details.