Spotlight on Oracle 11.0 - Getting Started Guide

Operating System Connection / Statistics

Differences between versions of operating systems mean that Spotlight is unable to collect all O/S statistics in all environments. Refer to the Spotlight on Oracle Release Notes for more information.

Connecting to Windows operating systems

The following error message is displayed:

Connection has been refused by the server

This means that Spotlight cannot access the operating statistics of the (Windows) database machine. Users must have access to the registry so that Spotlight can retrieve the operating system statistics. A user account with administrative rights to the target machine will allow this.

Connecting to Unix operating systems

Spotlight on Unix works with full functionality only when the iostat command is installed on the Unix system. This is NOT true for (HP-UX).

If iostat is NOT installed, Spotlight may display an error message such as iostat: command not found. If you encounter this error, you can:

• Choose to ignore the error. When you do so, the Spotlight error will no longer appear, but neither will a number of important disk statistics.
• Install the iostat command on the server. (On Red Hat Linux, this command is included in the sysstat package.)

When monitoring a database, what happens to the Operating System drilldown when connection is lost to the server?

The Operating System drilldown may report inaccurate data if Spotlight looses access to the database server.

1. Reconnect to the database. When the Connect dialog is displayed ensure that the OS server and OS type fields (and if necessary the OS Username and OS Password) are completed correctly.
2. Ensure the Unix or Windows server on which the Oracle database is installed is accessible to Spotlight on Oracle. See Spotlight on Unix | Configure the Unix System or for Spotlight on Windows there could be problems with Remote Connectivity, see Troubleshooting Spotlight on Windows.

Extra information for Spotlight on Oracle connections and Unix operating systems

If the database is running on Unix, Spotlight on Oracle may be using the REXEC or SSH protocols to submit various Unix commands (for example, netstat, vmstat, iostat, sar) to analyze system activity.

Example

If Spotlight uses REXEC, these commands must be accessible to an REXEC session for Spotlight on Oracle to be able to analyze Unix activity. If these commands are not located in the standard search path available to REXEC, Spotlight on Oracle displays an error.

Ensure that all Unix commands are located in the standard search path available to REXEC, or one of the following paths:

/usr/bin

/usr/sbin

/usr/ucb

If the command is located elsewhere in the file system, you must create a symbolic link in one of the areas listed above.

When observing a Unix operating system with a user ID/password that exists on the machine, it is possible that remote commands will not work on the machine unless the user ID is added to the /etc/hosts.equiv file on that Unix machine.

Extra information for Spotlight on Oracle RAC connections and Windows operating systems

My Spotlight on Oracle RAC connection is configured to collect operating-system (OS) data for the cluster under investigation, but no OS data has been collected. Where the Monitor OS option is selected (and the corresponding OS Username and OS Password details entered) in the Connection Properties dialog, make sure that the specified OS user account is valid for ALL nodes in the cluster. If not, add the relevant user account to all nodes where it is not valid. See also Connect to Spotlight on Oracle RAC.

Note: While the correct Oracle connection details for an Oracle RAC cluster will automatically be valid for all the Oracle instances in the cluster, the same is not necessarily true for the OS connection details of each node in the cluster.

Related Topics

Troubleshooting Spotlight on Windows

Configure the Unix System

Connect to Unix Systems