Additional Considerations with Basic Monitoring

Basic monitoring of Oracle processes is user-specific. As a result, an Oracle instance started under the context of another user cannot be detected as online. For example, if an Oracle instance is started under the user "oraVRT" and the agent is configured for a user "oracle", the agent will not detect the instance started by "oraVRT" as online.

This could lead to situations where:

• issuing a command to online a resource on a system might online an already running instance on that system (or any other system).
• within a failover service group, when the administrator onlines an Oracle resource on a system and if the Oracle instance is online on any other system within a cluster, the instance would come up. However, the database does not get mounted. In such circumstances, this failure is detected only by in-depth monitoring. If in-depth monitoring is not configured, then such a conflict would go undetected.

Hence, VERITAS recommends that instances started outside VCS control be configured with the correct Owner attribute corresponding to the OS user for that instance.