20 Jan 2025 08:31 AM
Hello,
could someone please explain/clarify if enablement of the Full Stack could replace "AWR" and "Diagnostic and Tuning Pack" in Oracle database monitoring:
1. AWR (Automatic Workload Repository):
Purpose: AWR collects and stores database performance statistics over time, helping DBAs analyze trends, diagnose issues, and fine-tune the database for optimal performance.
Usage: Primarily used for deep insights into Oracle database internals (SQL execution plans, system performance, wait events, etc.).
Replacement: Dynatrace does provide some database monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor queries and database performance.
As the AWR is very focused on Oracle-specific database metrics and performance analysis but - does it offer the same in-depth and specific features for detailed Oracle database tuning and diagnostics?
Does it provide the same level of internal Oracle-specific performance insights that AWR does?
2. Diagnostic and Tuning Pack:
Purpose: This is a paid feature in Oracle that includes a set of tools for diagnosing and tuning Oracle databases. It offers advanced features like SQL tuning, diagnosing slow queries, and providing advice for query optimization.
Usage: Focuses on identifying inefficiencies in SQL queries, looking for performance bottlenecks, and offering solutions for tuning the database.
Replacement: Dynatrace can provide some SQL-level performance insights and offer high-level diagnostics (such as slow queries or resource consumption), but does it offer the same depth of targeted tuning advice or optimization features like Oracle's Diagnostic and Tuning Packs?
Could Dynatrace replace and focus on specific optimization of the performance of Oracle databases at a very granular level?
Thank you in advance!
@TomásSeroteRoos
20 Jan 2025 08:57 AM
Short answer: no.
As of the time of writing this post, Dynatrace's database monitoring capability does not in any way compete with Oracle's own monitoring tools.
The power of Dynatrace is having full visibility of your entire stack in one place. It's being able to trace your user journeys end-to-end. It's having a single pane-of-glass your whole organization can utilize and democratizing data for everyone to see.
When it comes to database monitoring, the focus here is having enough data to be able determine when and where something is going wrong and how that is affecting the overall system health. Dynatrace gives you information on how your database is interconnected with other services and applications in your environment (through Database services) and with the use of the Oracle DB extension, you can get some additional insights into infrastructure health coming from the V$ views.
The deep, granular troubleshooting that something like Oracle's Diagnostic and Tuning Packs offers would be going a layer deeper than the capabilities that the Oracle DB extension has. As you mentioned, we provide some basic query analysis and execution plan fetching, but we don't compete with the level of detail and domain expertise that Oracle's own tools provide.
As for AWR, it does seem that a lot of the high level metrics collected are also available in the Dynatrace Oracle DB extension, so I guess whether you could replace it with the extension depends on your use case. But do expect AWR to be more complete and go deeper than the current Dynatrace extension.
In summary: use Dynatrace understand how your DBs interact with your environment and to do some high-level troubleshooting and analysis. Use Oracle's monitoring tools for a deeper analysis and database tuning efforts.
And by the way, just to address a point where I often see a lot of confusion: Full Stack agent monitoring doesn't do anything on database servers. It will help with database monitoring if you are Full Stack monitoring your client services, since only then will you be able to see the calls to the databases. But having full stack agents on servers running exclusively databases will not give you any more data than regular infra-only agents -- you will only be wasting your licenses.