Database/Instance status Oracle metric - com.dynatrace.extension.sql-oracle.status

[mn_24]

Hi,

I was wondering are you planning to release an improved version of this metric "com.dynatrace.extension.sql-oracle.status" ?

The only way it is working is when enabled "Alert on missing data" - in version 2.5.1 and also in the cluster versions from 3.*.* and above - the behavior is the same. IF it is not enabled and the DB is down - no problems are generated. 

So the data is fetched on every 1 min for this metric, right? In the Anomaly detected metric the values under "Violating Samples" are set to 4 and  "Sliding window" - to 5. 

The SQL behind is fine however it would never detect if the status is not OPEN and changed to whatever as it could not connect to a shutdown database. And the instance status for Dynatrace is never changed - it is always 1. So the workaround here is to enable "Alert on missing data" however this sometimes leads to false alarms.

@TomásSeroteRoos

[TomásSeroteRoos · Accepted solution]

This metric (and a couple of others, like the .topology metrics) is born out of the limitations of the extension framework we use to monitoring Oracle DB.

This metric primarily serves to capture metadata about the instance(s) it's connected to and create the appropriate entities in Dynatrace. We set its value to a constant of 1 and use the dimensions to extract all the metadata we want.

And indeed, because the extension can only collect data when a database is accessible, the database status will always show as OPEN, since otherwise the extension isn't able to access the database.

So the only way to work with this metric in terms of alerting is with the "Alert on missing data" setting, since the value of the metric never actually changes. This will in fact alert you on when the extension is no longer able to reach the database -- not necessarily when the database goes down per se. Not perfect, but the best we can do for now.

And to answer your question, no concrete plans to improve this as in the near future afaik. Although I do urge you to post an RFE about this in the Product ideas forum, as it may get some more traction there.