Glossary

MIB: Management Information Base.

A collection of SNMP Object ID's (OID) that are usually related

OID: SNMP Object ID

A period delimited sequence of numbers of the form a.b.c...x.y.z. It is a unique identifier for an item of information that is part of a MIB. Typically OIDs can have names associated with them. OIDs are hierarchical in nature. Hence 1.2.3 comes before 1.3 but after 1.2. For example the OID that contains the number of physical reads an Oracle7 database has performed is:

oraDbSysPhysReads, 1.3.6.1.4.1.111.4.1.1.1.8

RDBMS Public MIB

A Standard MIB for relational databases agreed upon by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This MIB supports a variety of OIDs relating to relational databases in general such as the database name (eg. rdbmsDbName, 1.3.6.1.3.55.1.2.1.4)

Oracle Private MIB(s)

A MIB that is specific to Oracle products only.

SNMP: Simple Network Management Protocol.

A network protocol that manipulates OIDs. In the case of Oracle, only two primitive SNMP operations are supported: get oid which fetches the value of oid and getnext oid which gets the value of the next OID after oid.

Event

An event is a condition that can arise on either a database or a node monitored by an Intelligent Agent. For example, a database that suddenly goes down results in a DBDOWN event. Events can be detected in one of two ways: (1) By running Tcl scripts periodically that monitor for certain conditions or (2) By allowing a 3rd party to report the occurence of an event directly to the agent.

Job

A job is a Tcl script that can be executed once or on a re-occuring schedule. Unlike events which monitor for specific conditions, jobs are expected to accomplish a certain task. Example of jobs are: backup and start database.

Fixit Job

A special kind of job that is triggered by the occurence of an event. For example, if the tablespace full event detects that a tables space is over 90% full, the fixit job will be run automatically to add a datafile to the tablespace.