Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Hub

Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Hub

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) 13.4 RU 2 has just been released this month. You may noticed that starting from EM 13.3 PG, the Top Activity page has been decommissioned. The Performance Hub page is the one that is available and yes, is not using Flash. If you have concerns about no longer having access to your EM Flash based graphs once the Web browsers stop supporting it, then your best bet is to upgrade your EM system.



Let’s talk about the features available on the Performance Hub page.

First of all, keep in mind that this page requires the Database Diagnostics and Tuning packs. All the data used by this page is provided thanks to Oracle’s instrumentation and stored in the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). In order to open the Performance Hub page, from the Database Home page navigate to Performance -> Performance Hub -> ASH Analytics.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Performance Menu
ASH Analytics Home Page

I’m dividing the ASH Analytics Home page into 5 main sections:

  1. Performance Hub main timeline (red)
  2. Tab selection between ASH Analytics and SQL Monitoring (blue)
  3. Average Active Sessions graph (yellow)
  4. SQL ID breakdown information (purple)
  5. User Session breakdown information (green)

The Performance Hub main timeline shows the current database performance divided in three classes; CPU utilization, User I/O and Wait. You may try to relate this to the old Top Activity graph, this one has additional functionality though.

Using ASH analytics you can customize your performance analysis by adjusting the timeline selector. Remember that in the Top Activity page this was fixed to 5 minutes.

Customize Your Performance Analysis

This becomes real handy when you try to isolate performance issues in the database. Once you select the desired timeline for you analysis, the bottom of the page will update based on you selection. Only data data falls under you selection will be displayed in sections 3,4 and 5.

On top of this, we still have the classic time related selectors and page refresh rate.

Page Refresh Rate – Time Selector

Using the tab selector you can quickly switch between ASH Analytics and SQL Monitoring.

Tab Selector

If you click on SQL Monitoring, sections 3, 4 and 5 of the ASH analytics page will be replaced with the SQL Monitoring session information table. Keep in mind that the information showed in the table will be limited by the timeline selector that we already discussed. Adjust you selection accordingly.

SQL Monitoring

Let’s now move to the Average Active Sessions section. This section displays detailed information of the current active sessions in the database during the selected period of time. You have the flexibility to adjust the graph by changing the graph’s dimensions. By default the graph will use the Wait Class a the main dimension.

Average Active Sessions

Apart of that you can also adjust the Maximum CPU limit line to show the limit based on the number of CPU’s, the number of CPU cores or you may decide to not show the limit at all.

Maximum CPU Limit Line

Another option is to only show foreground sessions (default) or to also include background sessions. You can even choose on whether show the standard load graph or to switch into a heat map like chart and select as many dimensions as needed.

Average Active Sessions Heat Map

The bottom of the page will display two tables. The one on the left side will show all the SQL information and the one on the right side the session information. You should be pretty familiar with these as the old Top Activity page was showing them as well.

You can also customize the view of these two tables and adjust the dimension. By default is set to the Wait Class.

SQL ID Dimension Selector

Last but not least is the ability to select a SQL ID from the table and either call SQL Tuning advisor or to create a SQL Tuning Set from the same page.

SQL Tuning Advisor / SQL Tuning Set Buttons

As you can see, this is not the old Top Activity page that we were used to, but definitively has more features and offers way more flexibility while working on monitoring or when trying to spot performance issues in the database.

Thanks,
Alfredo