Oracle Instrumentation Tips Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Without Oracle instrumentation (measuring with metrics), all Oracle performance tuning would be impossible. 

Oracle response time instrumentation

There are several ways to gather end-to-end response time in Oracle, and with SQL*Forms, you can gather instrumentation information from the logs.  There are also many Oracle instrumentation tools to measure response time:

• FormsPack - SQL*Forms instrumentation
• Ignite for Java - Java (J2EE, JDeveloper) response time instrumentation

Here is a sample of the FormsPack instrumentation of all areas of Oracle response time:

Oracle database instrumentation

Oracle 10g provides the AWR and ASH tables with real-time instrumentation, a great way to observe Oracle performance in real time.  I recommend this free poster of the ASH and AWR table relationships.

The STATSPACK and AWR reports are excellent sources of time-series instrumentation for database metrics.  You can use these tools to analyze STATSPACK and AWR instrumentation:
 

	The site www.statspackanalyzer.com has a great expert systems utility for analyzing STATSPACK reports and AWR reports.
	My latest book "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference", has an entire chapter dedicated to analyzing Oracle STATSPACK and AWR instrumentation, with over 900 pages of my best STATSPACK and AWR tuning tips and scripts.
	Another superb tool for STATSPACK report analysis is the Workload Interface Statistics Engine (Ion), www.ion-dba.com
	For professional STATSPACK analysis, out BC Oracle health check can certify that all of your global settings are fully optimized.

Of course, there are also third-party tools that provide Oracle instrumentation such as Quest Spotlight, Ignite! and many others.