Openadmin Tool for Informix Health Advisor Plugin

Brief introduction

Openadmin Tool for Informix is a web-based console for monitoring and managing one or more IBM Informix database servers. The OAT greatly simplifies management, allowing you to drill down to resource usage, view performance statistics and remote execution management operations, and so on. In addition, Oat's built-in Plug-in Manager supports the expansion and customization of the oat functionality to meet your business needs.

Health Advisor Plugin

Health Advisor is a plug-in included in Openadmin Tool (version 2.74 or later). Health Advisor analyzes the status of the Informix database server by running 48 checks. Then Health Advisor generates a report containing the results and recommendations. The Health Advisor report can be run manually as needed, or configured to run on a specific schedule, and send this report to the DBA by using e-mail.

As an automated health check system, the Health Advisor plug-in provides significant benefits for Informix DBAs. By scheduling Health Advisor to run regularly, DBAs can ensure that potential problem areas of the database server are regularly monitored. Health Advisor's automated e-mail reporting ensures that DBAs get alerts as early as possible, thereby enabling potential problems to be identified and repaired as early as possible before becoming a real problem, avoiding performance degradation or adversely affecting the operation of the database server. In addition, the Health Advisor report highlights not only the problem area, but also recommendations to ensure that DBAs have the information they need to handle the identified problems. Finally, the Health Advisor plugin can be customized. You can enhance your existing health checks and write your own alerts that define Health Advisor to meet your business needs.

While the goal of the Health Advisor plug-in is not to replace the system's depth analysis, it provides a very useful tool to supplement your existing practice and help ensure that your Informix database server is running optimally.

The working principle of Health Advisor

Navigate to the Health Advisor plug-in using the Health Center > Health Advisor link on the OAT menu.

Health Advisor is implemented as a set of tables and stored procedures on the database server and is deployed in the sysadmin database. The first time you access the Health Advisor page in the OAT, the Health advisor infrastructure is created on the database server instance. All of the tables and stored procedures associated with Health Advisor begin with the prefix "Hadv_".

When a Health Advisor health check runs, it runs using a stored procedure on the database server. OAT is an infrastructure that is used to set up and configure Health Advisor, and to view reports so that they can be run on demand. However, the actual execution of all health checks occurs in the sysadmin database on the database server.

Health Advisor needs to use the Informix 11.50.xc7 version or its later version.

Health Check Alert

Health Advisor consists of 48 alerts, which are checked every time Health advisor runs. For simplicity, these alerts are divided into 5 different categories: Configuration, ER, OS, performance, and Storage, and can be filtered or sorted by category. In the report, if an alert condition is met on the database server, each alert appears as a red or yellow alert to indicate the severity of the problem. You can enable or disable each alert, depending on the needs of your system or environment.

In the spirit of customization, many alerts define thresholds to control when the alert is triggered. Users are often able to set both a red alert threshold and a yellow alert threshold value. For example, in alerts that check for low free space conditions, you can configure thresholds that trigger red alerts (percent of free space) and thresholds that trigger yellow alerts. You can choose to set 10% as the yellow alert free space threshold and set 5% as the red Alert free space threshold value.

Some alerts can even define exceptions. We still take free space checks as an example. For this alert check, you may want to exclude certain dbspace. Suppose you have a dbspace dedicated to the logical log, and a dbspace dedicated to the physical log. When these space usage rates exceed 90%, you don't have to worry because their size won't continue to grow. In this scenario, you may want to specify that you exclude free space checks for logical and physical log dbspace so that these specific dbspace do not get a "failed" red or yellow alert.

You can manage alerts in the Alarms tab of the Alarms tab on the OAT Health Advisor page, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The alarms page in the OAT

Table 1 lists the list of alerts provided by the Health Advisor plug-in.