Cloud Database Monitoring using SelectStar – Part IV

We are looking at SelectStar, the heterogeneous monitoring solution for cloud databases. In the last blog post here, you installed the collector successfully on your on-premise Linux server, using the command and secret key provided on your SelectStar login screen.

When you logged in immediately afterwards, you saw that the collector has been accepted and you were asked to select the type of database you want to monitor (the screenshot in Part III of our article series).  Now suppose we didn’t do that immediately, and had shut down our on-premise Linux server. If we log in again to SelectStar, the system tells us to install our collector again.

The question is, where did the collector disappear to? Was it deleted at the SelectStar end?

No, simply start your on-premise server again. The collector processes start at the unix level, and the collector talks to SelectStar. Once that happens, you are back at the point where you are being asked to select a database to monitor.

Click on the Oracle “tile”, one of the many other tiles on the screen. You now have to configure the Oracle connection, since there is no auto-discovery for on-premise servers. Hopefully this will change in the future.

               On this screen, enter a friendly display name for the database, the host name or IP address, the port number of the Oracle listener, the Oracle SID (System Identifier), and the database service name. This presumes that you have all these details handy.

In the lower half of the screen, you need to enter the database credentials. We have used dbsnmp, which is the default Oracle user normally used for monitoring by the Enterprise Manager agent. This username is created along with the database even if you are not using Enterprise Manager, but is in a locked state. If you want to use dbsnmp, then unlock it first and change the password as appropriate, as a DBA in your database:

alter user dbsnmp identified by <yourpassword> account unlock;                  

               Use the same username and password on the configuration screen. You can then click on the “Test Connection” button to make sure the connector can talk to the database. For the connection test to be successful, make sure you put in the correct host name or IP address of your server. Get the full hostname by running “hostname –f” on your server.

If all goes well, you will see “Connected” at the bottom of the page. You can then click on the “Save” button to start monitoring this database.

If you click on the “prerequisites” link at the top of the screen, the help page is displayed. This is actually the page at https://app.selectstar.io/prereqs/oracle_database that you can access even when not logged in. This page explains the minimum database privileges required by the login user for monitoring with SelectStar.

create session
connect
select on dba_data_files
select on dba_free_space
select on dba_outstanding_alerts
select on dba_tablespaces
select on dba_temp_files
select on dba_temp_free_space
select on dba_undo_extents
select on global_name
select on gv_$archive_dest
select on gv_$filestat
select on gv_$instance
select on gv_$parameter
select on gv_$resource_limit
select on gv_$session
select on gv_$sgainfo
select on gv_$sql
select on gv_$sysmetric
select on gv_$system_event
select on gv_$system_wait_class
select on gv_$tempstat
select on v_$archive_dest
select on v_$controlfile
select on v_$database
select on v_$datafile
select on v_$filestat
select on v_$instance
select on v_$log
select on v_$logfile
select on v_$parameter
select on v_$recovery_area_usage
select on v_$resource_limit
select on v_$rman_backup_job_details
select on v_$tempfile
select on v_$version

This means we can create our own user for the purpose of monitoring by SelectStar, and grant the above privileges to the new user. In our case we selected the existing “dbsnmp” user which is a special Oracle user meant for Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring, so we don’t need to create a separate user with the above privileges.

We will continue in the next blog post.