Smarts Server Manager: Oracle Processes not showing correctly in Configure Process Monitoring dialog; Large number of Oracle processes showing associated with one process

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Smarts Server Manager (ESM) Configure Process Monitoring dialog shows large number of Oracle Processes associated with the oracle Process.  The following example of this issue shows that 236 Oracle processes are "lumped" together under the heading of oracle in this dialog:



 

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

This issue occurs because of a configuration issue. For the Oracle process configuration to use the full application command path, this functionality needs to be enabled in the Polling and Threshold Settings for the Settings Group for the Oracle Processes.

Resolution

To address the above issue where the processes that are in the Smarts Polling and Thresholds group are associated with only one Smarts Server Manager process, you must enable the process configuration using full application command path functionality. To do this, set the UseFullProcessPath to Enabled with the following instructions or see the guide attached to this article for complete instructions.

To enable or disable full application command path process configuration for a settings group:

1. In Polling and Threshold > Threshold, expand the ESM Domain Manager > ESM Process Monitoring Table Configuration > New Group > Settings.

2. Under Settings, click Service Process Table Configuration settings in the left pane. In the right pane, click Parameters.

3. In the field UseFullProcessPath, select any one of the following values from the drop-down list as shown in Figure 28 on page 228:

  True   To enable process configuration using full application command path for the setting group.

  False   To disable process configuration using full application command path for the setting group.

 

Note:

If, after applying the changes recommended above, ESM still does not separate out the processes in the Configure Process Monitoring table, then ESM might be reporting accurately. To verify, you will want to do a SNMP Walk of the Agent in order to inspect the process table for the oracle database and run a ps  ef | grep command against the oracle database. From the ps  ef output, use the PID for the oracle database in question and search for that PID in the walk of the agent. Check to see if you get a result similar to the screenshot below:

In the screenshot above, there is no full process path after the PID for the Oracle database. This would be expected behavior. In order to resolve, you will need to inspect the Oracle configuration in your environment to have those processes reference the full process path of the executable. If that is the case then changing UseFullProcessPath to Enabled will not have an impact and ESM is functioning normally.

 

Additional Information

See pages 140-141 of the EMC Smarts Server Manager Version 9.2 User and Configuration Guide (see attached document).

The support for full application command path Process Monitoring is a basic feature in Smarts Server Manager 9.2, and works with any host server that has SNMP HOST-RESOURCES-MIB (v2) loaded.

In Smarts Server Manager 9.2 and later, you can configure different setting groups with different matching criteria in the Smarts Polling and Thresholds console to use the full application command path for the Process Configuration of certain hosts. Once the association of the group is done based on the matching criteria, all the hosts in that group are configured using the process name or process full path, depending on the setting in Polling and Thresholds > Thresholds dialog.

The full application command path support for Process Monitoring can be used for database applications running on hosts. By using this option, the large number of applications that are part of the database can be individually identified.

However, full application command path Process Monitoring cannot be used for all hosts. The MIB at the host must be able to return a value for the path, and not the process name. If the full application command path does not exist in the MIB, it will not be displayed explicitly.