5/24/2018 Document 301137.

Copyright (c) 2018, Oracle. All rights reserved.

OSWatcher (Includes: [Video]) (Doc ID 301137.1)

In this Document

Purpose
Scope
Details
OSWatcher Quick Overview
OSWatcher Download
OSWatcher User Guides
Versions: Latest Version 8.1.2
OSWatcher Instructional Video Series
OSWatcher Analyzer Instructional Video Series
Related Links
Feedback/Support
Best Practices
Pro-Active Problem Avoidance and Diagnostic Collection
Ask Questions, Get Help, And Share Your Experiences With This Article
Discuss OSWatcher
References

APPLIES TO:

Oracle Net Services - Version 12.1.0.2 to 12.1.0.2 [Release 12.1]

Oracle Database - Enterprise Edition
Oracle Database - Personal Edition
Oracle Database - Standard Edition
Linux OS - Version Oracle Linux 5.0 to Oracle Linux 5.0 [Release OL5]
Information in this document applies to any platform.
Oracle Server Enterprise Edition
OSWatcher is certified to run on AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux 5.0 and above.

For Windows it is recommend to use Cluster Health Monitor instead. Please see Document 736752.1 for more information.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this document is to provide a reference for the data collected by OSWatcher and how to install, run and
use OSWatcher.

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SCOPE

Intended Audience: All Database Administrators

DETAILS

OSWatcher Quick Overview

OSWatcher (oswbb) is a downloadable utility to capture performance metrics from the operating system. OSWatcher use is
under Oracle's standard licensing terms and does not require additional licenses for use. When you install and run oswbb
as part of a performance diagnostic data collection best practice, you can aid in a quicker resolution of your SR with
support and development. oswbb is comprised of two separate components:

1. oswbb: a unix shell script data collector which collects and stores the data

2. oswbba: a java utility which will analyze the data automatically and provide advice and produce graphs and an html
document

Both components are contained in a single downloadable tar file.

This utility is not to be confused with the Exadata version of OSWatcher.

OSWatcher Download

OSWatcher can be downloaded

standalone. Installing the standalone version will always give you the very latest version, but the user will have to
manually install and run OSWatcher
installing as part of the TFA Database Support Tools Bundle. TFA will install and run OSWatcher automatically. It
will also update OSWatcher on a regular basis. It may or may not contain the latest version.

Click here to download OSWatcher as part of TFA Database Support Tools Bundle

Click here to download OSWatcher standalone

OSWatcher User Guides

Each component has a user guide to document the features and how to install and use. Access the user guides by clicking
the links below:

Document 1531223.1 OSWatcher User Guide

Document 461053.1 OSWatcher Analyzer User Guide

NOTE: If a file download dialog box does not appear when clicking on the download link, you may need to clear your
web browser's cache and/or restart your web browser.

All customers are strongly recommended to install version 8.1.0 or later release of OSWatcher.

Versions: Latest Version 8.1.2

December 14, 2017

Release (8.1.2)

This release fixes a bug in OSWatcher.sh with the data automatic private.net generator which has caused high SSH
connections. This fix is only applicable to OSWatcher running on RAC.

Multiple bug fixes for the analyzer including

java exceptions being thrown when analyzing network ip statistics

missing "Z" option in the documentation for the analyzer

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October 25, 2017

Release (8.1.1)

This release is a bug fix release for the OSWatcher analyzer.

Multiple bugs with analyzing subsets of the complete OSWatcher archive using the -b and -e command line options
and also the "S" menu option

Sept 6, 2017
Release (8.1.0)

This should be considered as a mandatory update release. This release has several important bug fixes and new features.

I/O analysis is now available for HP-UX

Detailed OS process tracking
Changes to AIX netstat collection
Additional sar collection for HP-UX
Improvements to UI

May 17, 2017

Release (8.0.1)

This is a bug fix release. This release fixes the traceroute automatic configuration tool code that was missing from the
base release 8.0.0. This fix applies only for RAC environments.

May 3, 2017
Release (8.0.0) This is a major update and includes new features. These new features include:

An automatic traceroute configuration tool that generates the private.net file for RAC environments.
Automatic physical core and virtual cpu count discovery to help identify cpu issues more accurately.
Automatic file management of additional custom data collections provided by using the extras.txt interface.
Customized ps command collection to capture accurate LPAR cpu process utilization on AIX.
New analyzer dashboard. The analyzer user interface is a responsive web page that provides drill down into major
subsystem components and provides integration with existing text output report.
Multiple bug fixes and user interface enhancements.

Download the latest version of OSWatcher by clicking on the following link: Click here to download OSWatcher.

Previous release (7.3.4) included fix for an issue with missing the default analysis directory when you run the analyzer for
the first time.

Previous release (7.3.3) included international date support and automatically collects date information in English language
format.

Previous release (7.3.2) included a bug fix for the oswnfs directory being checked for files every snapshot which got
accidentially introduced in release 7.3.1.

Previous release (7.3.1) included a bug fix for the oswifconfig directory not self purging The analyzer has a fix for i/o on
systems which has less than 3 devices listed in iostat.

Previous release (7.3) included a bug fix for HP-UX running the ifconfig command. The analyzer was optimized and the
time to perform an analysis on subsets of data was greatly been reduced.

Previous release (7.2) included several bug fixes and enhancements. A new subdirectory oswifconfig was added. This
directory contains the results of running ifcongig to check the status of network interfaces. This is especially useful for
diagnosing RAC issues. Many updates to the analyzer have also been made around analyzing information about the I/O
subsystem, especially throughput. Throuput is key to understanding and troubleshooting I/O issues on storage arrays.
New graphs had been added to the profiler for I/O throughput and cpu waits on I/O.

Previous release (7.1.3) fixed a bug that effects only the analyzer on AIX with parsing iostat data.

Previous release (7.1.2) fixed a bug that effects only the analyzer on Solaris for customers using prstat instead of the top
command.

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Previous release (7.1) included several bug fixes and enhancements. It fixed an important bug causing the snapshot
intervals to increase over time. There were also enhancements to the analyzer including the ability to exclude specific
directories in the archive from being analyzed.

Previous release (7.0.3) fixed a bug with with analyzing a subset of the archive using the -START / -STOP flags. The -s
flag needs to be added if this functionality is desired. The /docs/The_Analyzer/oswbba_README.txt contains an example
of this syntax.

Previous release (7.0.2) fixed a bug with oswbba parsing the ps output from older version 6 files.

Previous release (7.0.1) fixed a bug with AIX parsing top output.

Previous release (7.0) included a far more robust analyzer to analyze more metrics than before. Detailed memory
accounting per process along with the ability to analyze very specific time windows within your archive directory are some
of the new features with this release. Coming soon: This release will also allow for automation by Oracle Support to
automatically analyze your oswbb data upon upload of your oswbb data to an SR. The data will then be analyzed
automatically before it is even assigned out to a support analyst.

Previous release (6.0.1) included fix for handling blank lines in extras.txt and to fix broken profile option with oswbba.

Previous release (6.0) was the ability for users to add their own data collections to oswbb and have oswbb collect and
manage the data. This is useful for collecting additional statistics for applications like PeopleSoft and other applications.
oswbb is extensible through an API which allows oswbb to run additional shell scripts. Also included in this release was the
additional option on startup to specify the archive directory to any directory or device. The analyzer was also updated to
analyze a subset of available data in the archive.

Previous Release (5.2.0.1) was a bug fix for AIX iostat parsing in OSWbba.

Previous Release (5.2.0) was a bug fix release. Bug fixes including a fix for random vmstat corruption in oswbb and fixes
for memory status = unknown for linex when running the analyzer along with multiple formatting fixes with oswbba.

Previous release (5.1.1) was a change to allow the analyzer to reject compressed files. Prior to this release, the analyzer
would abort if it found files in the archive that were compressed. If compression of the archive is desired then the analyzer
should be run on the archive prior to compression.

Previous release (5.1.0) was the addition of a additional nfs collection for linux only and bug fixes for netstat
analyzer.network analyzer. Nfs collection is only provided for Linux. It is turned off by default. To turn it on edit the file
OSWatcher.sh and search for nfs_collect=0 and change it instead to nfs_collect=1. You must shutdown and restart osw
for the change to take effect. The archive directory can now reside on any disk. The built-in analyzer analyzes the data
oswbb collects and provides information on system slowdowns, hangs and other OS performance problems. See the
OSWatcher Analyzer User Guide for more details.

OSWatcher Instructional Video Series

Overview:

oswbb Directory Tree (03:20) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

What is new in Release 7.0 (1:27) Trouble seeing this video? Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

Installation:

How to install oswbb (03:00) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to install oswbb on RAC (03:50) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

Usage:

How to configure oswbb (01:17) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to create plugins to add your own custom data collection to oswbb (08:00) Trouble Seeing this video? Click
here to download
How to configure your archive directory to any location on startup (04:48) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to

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download
How to start oswbb (06:36) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to stop oswbb (02:53) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

A video entitled: "Performance Analysis Using OS Watcher" is available here descibing how to use OS Watcher to analyze
performance at the OS level

OSWatcher Analyzer Instructional Video Series

Overview:

OSWatcher Analyzer Overview (23:00) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

Installation:

How to resolve error no java found (03:36) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

Usage:

How to resolve java out of memory error (03:50) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to generate graphs using oswbba (06:38) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to generate system html profile using oswbba (04:10) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to run OSWBBA from menu (11:20) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to run OSWBBA from command line (04:10) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to run oswbba analysis on very specific time window (04:05) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to
download
How to run the analyzer on only some files in the archive (02:41) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to
download
How to run oswbba on windows platform (04:00) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
How to generate an analysis report using oswbba (01:37) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download
Walkthrough of Release 7.0 Analysis Report (8:29) Trouble Seeing this video? Click here to download

Related Links

OSWatcher is now extendable. You can add custom data collections to OSWbb. To see how you can add data collections
for applications like PeopleSoft click on the link below:

Document 1531211.1 How to extend OSWbb to monitor PeopleSoft domains

Feedback/Support

The utility documented and downloaded from this page is the only version of OSwatcher that is supported.

For support for the Exadata version of OSwatcher (ExaWatcher), contact or log SR with Exadata team

If you are using the standalone version (available for download here), and encounter problems running OSWatcher which
are not listed under the Known Issue section of the User Guide or would like to provide comments/feedback about
OSWatcher (including enhancement requests) please post to the Community forum here .

Also, if you are entitled with Long Term Support in Oracle Linux, please file a Service Request.

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Best Practices

Pro-Active Problem Avoidance and Diagnostic Collection

Although some problems may be unforeseen, in many cases problems may be avoidable if signs are detected early
enough. Additionally, if an issue does occur, it is no use collecting information about that issue after the event. OSWatcher
is one of the tools that support recommend for collecting such diagnostics. For information on suggested uses, other
proactive preparations and diagnostics, see:

Document 1482811.1 Best Practices: Proactively Avoiding Database and Query Performance Issues
Document 1477599.1 Best Practices Around Data Collection For Performance Issues

Ask Questions, Get Help, And Share Your Experiences With This Article

Would you like to explore this topic further with other Oracle Customers, Oracle Employees, and
Industry Experts?

Click here to join the discussion where you can ask questions, get help from others, and share your experiences with
this specific article.
Discover discussions about other articles and helpful subjects by clicking here to access the main My Oracle Support
Community page for Database Tuning.

Discuss OSWatcher

The window below is a live discussion of this article (not a screenshot). We encourage you to join the
discussion by clicking the "Reply" link below for the entry you would like to provide feedback on. If you
have questions or implementation issues with the information in the article above, please share that below.

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143 Replies Latest reply on May 1, 2018 4:56 PM by user803167-Oracle 

Steve Dixon-Oracle Apr 22, 2014 8:37 AM

OSWatcher : Discussion about: (Note:301137.1)

This thread can be used for discussion of Document 301137.1 "OSWatcher User Guide (Includ

Please post your comments about this article, questions and observations about OSWatcher or j
fellow community users.
Thanks!

307863 Views Tags:

Average User Rating Your Rating:

(6 ratings)

User405783 Oct 17, 2012 1:53 PM ( in response to Steve Dixon-Oracle)

1. Re: OSWatcher Black Box: Discussion about: (Note:301137.1)

I am not able to see the startOSW.sh after doing tar xvf oswbb511.tar. It gave the error

tar: Skipping to next header

tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Thanks

Actions

Steve Dixon-Oracle Oct 18, 2012 2:27 AM ( in response to User405783)

2. Re: OSWatcher Black Box: Discussion about: (Note:301137.1)

It seems likely this is something to do with the way the tar file has been downloaded or
contains obsolescent base-64 headers" there are various solutions on the internet

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REFERENCES

NOTE:461053.1 - OSWatcher Analyzer User Guide

NOTE:946107.1 - OSW : What Is The OSWATCHER Effect On The Server Performance And What Are The Alternative
Commands?
NOTE:1477599.1 - Best Practices: Proactive Data Collection for Performance Issues
NOTE:1531223.1 - OS Watcher User's Guide
NOTE:1617454.1 - ExaWatcher utility on Exadata database servers and storage cells
NOTE:736752.1 - Introducing Cluster Health Monitor (IPD/OS)
NOTE:1482811.1 - Best Practices: Proactively Avoiding Database and Query Performance Issues

Didn't find what you are looking for?

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