The probes in this section may be applied to instances of the Oracle database matching the versions supported. Oracle probes require the configuration of the database and associations made by running the following command:

 $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/catalog.sql 

In addition, for these probes to function properly, the Oracle user configured in the probe must have minimum privileges of CONNECT and SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE.

Some Oracle probes are specifically aimed at tuning devices for long-term performance gains, rather than avoiding outages. Therefore, Red Hat recommends scheduling them to occur less frequently, between every hour and every two days. This provides a better statistical representation, de-emphasizing anomalies that can occur at shorter time intervals. This applies to following probes: Buffer Cache, Data Dictionary Cache, Disk Sort Ratio, Library Cache, and Redo Log.

For CRITICAL and WARNING thresholds based upon time to work as intended, their values cannot exceed the amount of time allotted to the timeout period. Otherwise, an UNKNOWN status is returned in all cases of extended latency, thereby nullifying the thresholds. For this reason, Red Hat strongly recommends ensuring that timeout periods exceed all timed thresholds. In this section, this refers specifically to the probe TNS Ping.

Finally, customers using these Oracle probes against a database using Oracle's Multi-Threaded Server (MTS) must contact Red Hat support to have entries added to the RHN Server's /etc/hosts file to ensure that the DNS name is resolved correctly.