Building Versatile Tools for IT

Tip of the day: external tools

elephant — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:08:05 +0000

Not many users know that you can actually extend Insider beyond just monitoring. You can use external tools, any application indeed, to add functionality such as built-in Startup and Shutdown commands

Let’s say you want to add a custom SQL as a command to the Insider’s right-click pop-up menu. Just select Tools/Configure, choose SQL*Plus and enter your SQL. It’s that easy

Mobile monitoring

elephant — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:39:51 +0000

With the focus of enterprise monitoring gradually shifting toward mobile platforms, we, at FourthElephant have been busy developing a mobile client for our flagship product, Insider. The mobile client will allow users to check out server’s health, receive alerts and run corrective commands. Release date, details and screenshots will follow soon. Stay tuned!

Insider SQL Developer plugin 3.2

elephant — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:29:18 +0000

A new plugin for SQL Developer has been released. It is compatible with the latest SQL Developer version and it’s fantastic! All Insider views (except OS) have been added to the plugin. That is Sessions, Locks, Storage, Memory, Top, Waits, Undo, Backup just to name a few. Must see.

Insider 3.2

elephant — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:21:05 +0000

New alerts (a longop has started, sort is spilling to disk, parallel downgraded to serial and DataGuard status) and minor improvements. Come and get it

Tip of the day: locks view

elephant — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:08:26 +0000

We all need to kill a blocking session every once in a while. Some people even find a sadistic pleasure in doing so, let’s face it. Some people do it daily. It is for this type of serial killers that the tools like Insider are created, they want blood and they want plenty of it. Running and interpreting SQL scripts just to find out who is holding a lock, who is being held, what is being held, when and where and how won’t cut it for them. Let’s see how Insider can help.
Let’s open the Locks view and – voila – Insider does it again. There it is, plain and simple. SID 26 is holding a table and won’t give it up, no matter what. Now that we established this yet another evidence of human greed, let’s get down to business.

Move your mouse over to the toolbar area. Do you see this button with a face screaming pain and a sort of red line across it? Do you know what it is? This is it. Death sentence. Do it

Tip of the day: advanced session filter

elephant — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:08:50 +0000

There is more to Insider than meets the eye, believe me. Take the Session view for example. Yes, you can add and remove columns, you can sort it, you can search but what about this little icon sitting right next to the Filter combo? What’s that? You don’t know? I didn’t think so. It’s an advanced session filter that you can use to build your own custom filters in the Session view. Behind the scenes it is simply a WHERE clause that is attached to an Oracle query, more or less. Here are some examples:

Active session?
STATUS = 'ACTIVE'
Been executing for longer than a minute?
STATUS = 'ACTIVE' AND LAST_CALL_ET > 60

(if you are wondering like what the heck LAST_CALL_ET is just hover your mouse over it in the pop-up menu)

Just about anything can be expressed with these little filters, just give me yours if you don’t believe me and I’ll do it for you, free of charge, while I am feeling generous, sort of.

Tip of the day: custom alerts

elephant — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:18:58 +0000

You probably know by now that Insider fires about a hundred alerts to let you know something is wrong with your server or database. Just about every possible problem condition has already been included into this rich set of alerts and it won’t require you to do anything – it comes out of the box. But what if you need to add a custom alert? Something specific to your environment or application? Well, you can do it with Insider. Nothing can be easier.

All you have to do is to send a message to ‘INSIDER’ pipe, using Oracle DBMS_PIPE package. Here is how:

DECLARE RES INTEGER; BEGIN DBMS_PIPE.PACK_MESSAGE('My custom alert'); DBMS_PIPE.PACK_MESSAGE('ON'); DBMS_PIPE.PACK_MESSAGE(50); RES:=DBMS_PIPE.SEND_MESSAGE('INSIDER'); END;

And here is what you’ll get:

that was easy, wasn’t it? Read ~~the f~~ the Insider User Guide’s “User-defined alerts” section for more info

Tip of the day: most active sessions

elephant — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:13:24 +0000

Have you ever wondered – who is thrashing my little server? Whose session is bogging down the database? Are you ready to pack up the way Arnie used to when he was a boy and go find the villain? And don’t forget those huge army metal shears – you’ll need it later. So, there is nothing simpler:
Check out the Session view and sort by Activity column – the one atop, spinning like mad – he is your primary target. Go get’im. Find his network cable. You know what to do.

Oh, yes and:
I’LL BE BACK

Tip of the day: the biggest object

elephant — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:19:09 +0000

Despite our best efforts we found out that not everybody knows how to use all of the features of Insider, which is not surprising – there are too many of them. So we thought a tip of the day (week?) can be a little help. So here is the first one. I want to know what table/index is taking up all the space in my tablespace. Yes, I know, DBA_EXTENTS and all that stuff. Save yourself a minute. Open the Storage tab and check out the Objects subview. Click on the Size column to sort in descending order. Voila, here is your bad boy

Oh, yes, and while we are at that, here is a random thought of the day: Insider is the best monitoring/performance tuning tool for Oracle, period. And if anyone knows where I put my glasses, please, don’t hesitate to comment

Insider 3.1 released

elephant — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:50:26 +0000

Insider 3.1 is out. It features an auto-switching mode (sort of a slide show across all open servers), a new Oracle buffer pool contents view and Scheduler jobs view. A new bind variables tab shows the actual bind variable values for a selected session’s SQL. A new alert has been added when a number of active sessions goes above a set threshold. A number of improvements has been made to Insider tables, including:

Search. You can now search inside a table. Just click within the column you want to search and start typing
Expand/collapse all if a table includes a tree-like structure (such as sessions)
Row count has been added