Spotlight on Oracle 11.0 - Getting Started Guide

Archive Critical Failure Alarm

Spotlight raises an Archive Critical Failure alarm when the number of working archive destinations for the database instance is about to fall below the minimum number needed to archive Oracle redo logs successfully. This occurs when:

• A MANDATORY archive destination become full, OR
• There are fewer working destinations than the number required for successful archiving (specified by the Oracle LOG_ARCHIVE_MIN_SUCCEED_DEST parameter).

When you see this alarm, you should make space in the archive log destination by purging – or by backing up to an offline medium – any archived files that are not immediately needed.

Suggestions for improving the archiving process

• Increase the number and/or size of the online redo log files.
• Evaluate the checkpoint interval and frequency.
• Evaluate the number of archive destinations.
• Add multiple archiver processes.

About archiving

Archiving is important for safeguarding database changes and for recovery. It is important to protect and back up archive files to some offsite media.

There are three primary goals when archiving redo log files:

• All online redo logs should be archived and backed up successfully.
• Archiver busy waits should be prevented.
• Recovery time should be reduced by keeping all archives on disk from the last database backup.