Server Generated Alerts

Oracle Database 10g has features that help the DBA reduce the time spent on database monitoring tasks by automatically notifying the DBA of performance or resources allocation issues and suggesting remedial actions. A server-generated alert is a notification message from the server of an impending problem.

Whenever a database metric does not match expected values or thresholds levels on different metrics are reached, an alert will be issued. This notification will contain the error/alert condition, and may contain suggestions for correcting the problem. Alerts are also generated when the problem condition has been cleared.

MMON helps by regularly scheduling monitoring actions. MMON can also be invoked when unusual conditions are detected in foreground processes by sending an alert. These alerts contain a description of the problem and advice on fixing the problem. OEM previously collected many of these alerts. Besides these alerts, by using the history of metric values in the workload repository, many database components self-tune.

The main difference between OEM alerts and server generated alerts is that with server generated alerts the metrics computation and threshold validations are performed by Oracle Database 10g and not by the OEM agent.