DBCollect

Database Workload Info Collector

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What is DBCollect

DBCollect is a performance and metadata collection tool, written in Python, for servers running Oracle databases, providing workload and config data from database hosts.

It is NOT (yet?) an official DELL tool - but written by Bart Sjerps as an independent Open-Source project

It collects database and host information from Oracle database servers in a standardized way, so it can easily be processed by workload analysis tools. It supports Enterprise Linux (RHEL, OEL, CentOS) as well as AIX and Solaris (SPARC).

Don't have much time? Jump to the Quickstart guide

How does it work

  • System or Database Administrator runs DBCollect on a database host
    • Can be a VM or bare metal host
    • Should be run on all database nodes in scope of the project
    • Supported are Linux (EL6 or higher, runs out of the box), AIX, HP-UX or Solaris (may require some steps to make it work)
  • DBCollect detects running Oracle databases (instances)
    • Generates capacity and performance reports
    • Also picks up OS config and performance data (SAR/Sysstat)
  • Output is created as a ZIP file in TEMP dir
    • /tmp/dbcollect-<hostname>-<timestamp>.zip
  • Customer sends ZIP files for further processing
    • Secure FTP, or direct upload to LoadMaster website (via provided secure UUID url)
  • Additional info to be provided, such as
    • Licensing details
    • Grouping (which systems are prod, test/dev, DR etc), VM-to-Hypervisor mapping
    • Any current issues (performance, other)
    • Physical locations
    • SLA requirements (RPO/RTO, yearly growth, platform requirements/preferences i.e. hypervisors, storage/servers, etc)

Description

dbcollect generates workload data for LoadMaster (The advanced DB workload analyzer tool)

It collects various OS configuration files and the output of some system commands, as well as AWR or Statspack reports for each database instance, and other database information.

The results are collected in a special ZIP file named (default): /tmp/dbcollect-<hostname>-<timestamp>.zip

For the (now obsolete) Dell LiveOptics and Dell's Workload Analyzer tools, the per-database directories in the ZIP file contain all files you need to upload to the reporting tools.

For LoadMaster (advanced workload analyzer), send the entire ZIP file (via secure FTP or other means). We will provide an upload link on request.

Author

Bart Sjerps (bart <at> dirty-cache <dot> com) - with some great contributions from others