ORAchk Tips

The ORAchk (Oracle Check) utility was previously known RACchk. In its older incarnation, RACchk examined the Oracle RAC system's configuration looking for areas that needed improvement. Oracle Corporation decided to extend the utility to include more than just an Oracle database and focus on the entire Oracle stack of software. ORAchk now examines the following areas.

?         Oracle Database (both RAC and single-instance)

?         Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control

?         Oracle Sun servers

?         Oracle E-Business Suite

No matter which Oracle software component is being examined, ORAchk is scanning the configuration looking for problems. It can provide a report showing health risks. It is recommended that the database administrator run a report before and after software configuration changes to understand if those changes can cause future problems. Since this book is for Oracle RAC database performance, only the first Oracle component in the list above will be discussed.  The other 3 software components are out of scope for this book.

The ORAchk utility can be downloaded from Note 1268927.1 on My Oracle Support. The download is a simple zip file. After downloading the file, use the OS unzip utility to extract its contents. The installation is complete after unzipping the file. Run the orachk executable to start the analysis. The ?oracle? user should be used to run the utility. By default, orachk will ask to verify the current Grid Infrastructure home. Next, orachk verifies ssh user equivalency.

[oracle@host01 orachk]$ ./orachk

CRS stack is running and CRS_HOME is not set. Do you want to set CRS_HOME to /u01/app/crs12.1.0.2?[y/n][y]y

Checking ssh user equivalency settings on all nodes in cluster

If ssh user equivalency fails, orachk can fix the situation temporarily or permanently. If the permanent fix is chosen, this will be the only time orachk will make any changes to the system. The next step is to select the databases to check.

Searching for running databases . . . . .

. .

List of running databases registered in OCR

1. orcl

2. None of above

Select databases from list for checking best practices. For multiple databases, select 1 for All or comma separated number like 1,2 etc [1-2][1].1

This system only has one database. The output gives options to verify multiple databases if the system has them. Next, orachk verifies that various software components are up and running.

Checking Status of Oracle Software Stack - Clusterware, ASM, RDBMS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

                         Oracle Stack Status                           

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

HostName CRS Install RDBMS Install  CRS UP ASM UP RDBMS UP DB Instance Name

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

host01   Yes         Yes            Yes    Yes    Yes      orcl1     

host02   Yes         Yes            Yes    Yes    Yes      orcl2     

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copying plug-ins

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The orachk utility will need to run some checks as the root user. The database administrator will either need to supply the root password, have the user executing the utility configured with sudo access, or skip the root portion of the checks.

16 of the included audit checks require root privileged data collection . If sudo is not configured or the root password is not available, audit checks which  require root privileged data collection can be skipped.

1. Enter 1 if you will enter root password for each  host when prompted

2. Enter 2 if you have sudo configured for oracle user to execute root_orachk.sh script

3. Enter 3 to skip the root privileged collections

4. Enter 4 to exit and work with the SA to configure sudo  or to arrange for root access and run the tool later.

Please indicate your selection from one of the above options for root access[1-4][1]:- 1

After answering the root collection question, the orachk utility goes to work. Following some period of time, the analysis is complete and a report is generated. The orachk utility will also create a zip file that can be uploaded to My Oracle Support if requested by a support engineer.

Detailed report (html) - /home/oracle/orachk/orachk_host01_orcl_091214_235107/orachk_host01_orcl_091214_235107.html

UPLOAD(if required) - /home/oracle/orachk/orachk_host01_orcl_091214_235107.zip

The generated report is an html file, which can obviously be opened in any web browser. The first part of the report contains a general summary

The overall system health score is seen at the top. Many of the findings contain a hyperlink named ?detail? or ?View? which will jump to the documentation location that explains the analysis in much more detail.

The most important part of the ORAchk report is the section titled Findings Needing Attention. This section groups the findings into categories named FAIL, WARNING, ERROR and INFO. Many of the findings are not performance related, but rather they focus their attention on keeping the cluster and its database operational and following best practices. Some findings are performance related as can be seen in the last two findings of the figure below.

The last two findings above tell us that NIC bonding is not configured for the public network or the Cluster Interconnect. Each finding has more detail that can be seen by clicking on the View hyperlink. The last finding in the figure about would bring the detail screen seen below.

Each detail for each finding should include a My Oracle Support Note for even more details. While the details of this finding focus on high availability, we know from the chapter on tuning the Cluster Interconnect that this specific finding is performance related as well. The Cluster Interconnect can increase its bandwidth by NIC Bonding or HAIP.  The finding shown below is obviously more performance related and was discussed in Chapter 3 of this book.

It is a good practice to run ORAchk regularly. Optionally, the report can be emailed to the database administrator. The following command will set the autorun interval to seven days and define the email address for the report.

[oracle@host01 orachk]$ ./orachk -set "AUTORUN_INTERVAL=7d;NOTIFICATION_EMAIL=dba@acme.com"

Created AUTORUN_INTERVAL for ID[orachk.default]

Created NOTIFICATION_EMAIL for ID[orachk.default]

With the parameters set, the ORAchk daemon needs to be started.

[oracle@host01 orachk]$ ./orachk -d start

ORAchk will now run regularly and automatically send the finds to the database administrator.

A great strength of ORAchk is the ability to compare two reports. This feature is most important when used to determine if a maintenance activity has implemented a change that could negatively impact the cluster and its database. The following example instructs ORAchk to compare the difference between two reports.

[oracle@host01 orachk]$ ./orachk -diff orachk_host01_orcl_091214_235107 orachk_host01_orcl_091314_043033

Summary

Total   : 182

Missing : 0

New     : 8

Changed : 0

Same    : 174

File comparison is complete. The comparison report can be viewed in: /home/oracle/orachk/orachk_091214235107_091314043033_diff.html

The resulting html file can be used to see the differences. Ideally, the differences show the configuration trending in a positive direction where the number of bad findings is decreasing over time.

The ORAchk utility replaces the RACchk tool used by database administrators in the past. The new name reflects the tools ability to check many different software components in the Oracle stack, but still includes Grid Infrastructure and Oracle RAC. Regularly scheduled runs of ORAchk can help the database administrator see deficiencies in the Oracle RAC configuration and hopefully show improvement. ORAchk can be a great tool to ensure that maintenance activities that change the configuration do not make the system worse.