How the Agent Makes Oracle Highly Available

The VCS enterprise agent for Oracle continuously monitors the Oracle and listener processes to verify they are functioning properly. The agent provides two levels of application monitoring:

• Primary or Basic Monitoring

In the Basic monitoring mode, the agent verifies that the Oracle and listener processes are present in the process table.

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  Note    Basic monitoring cannot detect whether processes are in a hung or stopped states.

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• Secondary or Detail Monitoring

In the Detail monitoring mode, the agent runs a perl script that executes commands against the database and listener to verify their status.

The agent detects application failure if the monitoring routine reports that the Oracle or listener processes are not functioning properly. When this occurs, the Oracle service group fails over to another node in the cluster, thus ensuring high availability for the Oracle services and the database.