Databases are essential for many IT processes. Their performance and reliability depends on many factors and it makes sense to use a dedicated tool that helps you to stay on top of things. Monitoring your database with an external tool helps you identify performance issues proactively, but there are many factors to consider. With the wrong approach, you run the risk of missing valuable information and also can waste a lot of time configuring your database monitoring.

In this tutorial, I will give a quick guide on how to monitor Oracle Database with Checkmk, a universal monitoring tool for all kinds of IT assets. Oracle Database is one of the most common database management systems (DBMS) for relational databases and Checkmk comes with a great preconfigured Oracle monitoring, so it will only take you a few minutes to get started. This will not only ensure the best performance of your databases, but also give you the option to find optimization opportunities.

Preconditions

You need a Checkmk site up and running. For this article, I am using the Checkmk Free Edition version 2.1.0p19, which I installed on Ubuntu server (version 20.04). Checkmk runs on Linux, including RHEL, CentOS, Debian, and others, as well as in a container, or as a virtual appliance. You can download the latest Checkmk version for all platforms from the official Checkmk website and follow this video tutorial to take your first steps.

In this tutorial, I will use a simple Oracle server as an example. In my case, my Oracle database version 19.0 runs on a hardware server, and I use Rocky Linux version 9.0 as my operating system. I will show you how to configure and install the Checkmk agent. However, Checkmk can also monitor remote databases without the need to install an agent.

You don't need any previous experience with Oracle monitoring, as Checkmk takes over the collection of the most important monitoring services and also sets threshold values for warnings and critical states. However, you need access rights to create user accounts for the database you want to monitor, you will do this in the first step.

Step 1: Creating an Oracle user account for the monitoring

First, you need to create a user account that Checkmk will use to query the monitoring data from your database. In my case, I am using SQL Plus and create the user through the terminal. The procedure differs depending on which Oracle environment and tool you are using. You can read more details about this in the Oracle documentation.