IBM Solutions Technical Brief: Diagnosing Oracle Database Performance on AIX Using IBM NMON and Oracle Statspack Reports

Overview

For Oracle Database environments, ongoing performance monitoring and tuning activities are essential to getting the most of your systems investment. In order to be most effective, monitoring and tuning must be performed at multiple levels of the solution stack. This includes the hardware, Operating System, Database and Application levels. This paper discusses two commonly available performance monitoring tools - Oracle Statspack and IBM NMON - and how they can be used to monitor and analyze possible performance issues for Oracle Database applications running in an AIX/System p server environment. In Oracle10g environments, Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports can be used in place of Statspack. A number of real-world examples of Statspack and NMON data are provided.