Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting Report
Oracle database inventory is a strategic topic, given the cost and complexity of collecting the required data. Oracle Inventory can be performed through the FlexNet inventory agent (by far the preferred option as there is no port opening or authentication required) or through the FlexNet Beacon. Ideally, Oracle Discovery should be performed monthly, for providing additional inventory value and to identify what servers Oracle is installed on.
There are many reasons why Oracle inventory can fail (OS authentication not enabled, insufficient privileges if impersonation is not adopted for the agent and so on) and getting the clear view on issues is a real challenge.
The Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting report aggregates data from multiple resources (logs, Oracle Instances Inventory, Oracle discovery information and so on) to provide a single insight on Oracle issues. To limit the quantity of data and false positives, the report focuses on the following:
| • | Discovered devices with both an Oracle Inventory history and errors. |
| • | ORA01 errors in the last 90 days are considered. |
Note:Warnings pertaining to powered off instances at the time of inventory are ignored.
| • | Active Servers with an “unspecified” edition of Oracle Database installed with an agent inventory less than 90 days. |
| • | Such “unspecified” installations can be a sign that Oracle Database is installed, but the instance has not been fully inventoried. This can happen if the instance is not mounted or is powered off (fail over node in an Oracle cluster). |
Generating the Report
To generate the report, perform the following steps.
Note:This report is scoped to the data that each operator is entitled to see, according to their access rights on inventoried VMs and/or on VM host devices for non-inventoried VMs.
To generate an Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting report:
| 1. | Go to the Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting page (Reporting > Operations Reports > Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting). You can also access this report by going to the Saved Reports page (Reporting > Saved Reports & Views > Saved Reports), navigating to the “SAM Operations” folder, and clicking Oracle Inventory Troubleshooting. |
| 2. | Click Run report. |
All results are shown as of the latest inventory import and license reconciliation process, for which the date and time are shown in the right-hand end of the title bar, against Reconciled.
Reading the Report
Properties in the report are grouped under the following headers that identify their underlying database objects:
| • | Device Properties |
| • | Discovered Device Properties |
| • | Issue Analysis Properties |
The following tables list all the properties that are available in the report. Some of these properties are not displayed by default; however, you can make them visible by moving them out of the column chooser.
The following device properties are available.
|
Property |
Description |
|
Cluster |
The cluster of the inventory device (Virtual machine). |
|
Corporate unit |
The corporate unit of the device. |
|
Cost center |
The cost center of the device. |
|
Host |
The host of the inventory device (Virtual machine). |
|
Inventory agent |
If you have multiple overlapping inventory sources that report on the same device, it is possible for some inventory details to come from one source and other details from another source. This column identifies the most recent source of inventory for this device, so that the value may change as uploads from different sources are imported. |
|
Inventory Date |
The date when the most recent inventory information was collected by the Last inventory source for this inventory device. The inventory process generates the value of this field. |
|
List of Oracle installations for this device |
The list of Oracle database applications recognized on the device. Unspecified editions come often from the fact that a version installed on the server had no successful Oracle inventory for an instance. |
|
List of Oracle Instances for this device |
The list of Oracle Instances (and their inventory dates) that exist for the server with potential issue. |
|
Location |
The location of the device. |
|
Name |
The name of the inventory device. The compliance calculation updates this field with the machine name returned in inventory (matched by several properties, including serial number). The link will lead to the detail of the inventory device record (“all inventory” screen). You can check installed applications, link to Oracle instances etc. |
|
Operating System |
The operating system running on this device. |
|
Status |
Indicates the current state of an inventory device. The report focuses on active devices or devices that have been discovered with Oracle information but are not inventoried. |
The following discovered device properties are available.
|
Property |
Description |
|
IP Address |
IP Address as identified in discovered devices. |
|
Last local Oracle discovery status |
Status of the last discovery the agent performs before running full inventory. |
|
Last Oracle Discovery Date |
Specifies the date and time when IT Asset Management discovered Oracle database on this device. The discovery and inventory process generates the value of this field. |
|
Last Oracle local inventory detailed error |
When the last Oracle inventory status was an error, the detailed error. |
|
Last Oracle local inventory error |
When the last agent Oracle inventory status was an error, the summary of the error. Please note that the report focuses on errors (and checks the logs) but will consider as successful and Oracle inventory where the only error logs are: “A database instance was discovered but was not running at inventory time. Please check whether the instance should be running.” |
|
Last Oracle local inventory status |
The status of the last Oracle local inventory by the FlexNet inventory agent. |
|
Last Oracle log date |
This date is the most recent of the following logs: Oracle Inventory (Remote and local) and Oracle Discovery (Remote and local). It is a practical way to understand the “Latest reported sign of Oracle”. |
|
Last Oracle remote inventory detailed error |
When the last beacon Oracle inventory status was an error, the summary of the error. Please note that the report focuses on errors (and checks the logs) but will consider as successful and Oracle inventory where the only error logs are: “A database instance was discovered but was not running at inventory time. Please check whether the instance should be running.” |
|
Last Oracle remote inventory status |
The status of the last Remote Oracle Inventory (through listener by a Flexera beacon). Note that Oracle inventory is in the vast majority of cases performed by the Flexera agent (local inventory). In some cases (older version or impossibility to install an agent (Exadata), remote inventory is necessary. |
|
Last remote Oracle discovery status |
Status of the discovery by the beacon. It is recommended to run an Oracle Discovery once in a while (monthly) to identify Oracle servers that have no agent. |
|
Name & IP Address |
Name and IP Address (when available). The link will lead to the detail on the Discovered device related to the record. In the discovered device record, you can find more information related to longs (status tab). |
|
Oracle |
This is a Yes/No flag indicating whether the computer is running Oracle Database. Editable in the Databases tab of the discovered device properties. |
The following issue analysisr properties are available.
|
Property |
Description |
|
Additional matching method |
Discovered device and inventory device records are linked during the inventory import process. It can happen that the same device comes from two sources (and Discovery activity and an agent scan) an there is no sufficient information. The report makes successive tries link the records and provide the full picture on a single row. The successive matches are: Name and IP address, then IP Address, then Name. |
|
Duplicates In this Report |
The report brings together data coming from the “discovered devices” and from “Inventory devices”. In some situation discovered devices can have duplicates. The report tries to merge information. The number of duplicates shows the number of rows that have the same device name to identify possible partial information for a row. |
|
Oracle Inventory Issue Analysis |
This column provides a summary of the issues identified with potentially a priority based on identified errors. |