Best Oracle Peformance Tools?

What tools do you use? What are your favorites and why? As someone who has been working  Oracle performance tools for the last 15 years, I’m always interested in what the best tools are.  Here is my list of tools that I’m aware of (what other tools are out there?)

		price	would I use it ?	db perf	multi-db	sql tune	notes
Specialty
	orasrp	free	yes			x	sql trace analyzer
	10053 Viewer	free	yes			x	replace .doc with .zip and unzip
	xplan	free	yes			x	extend explain plan info from Alberto Dell Era
	latchprof	free	yes	x			Tanel’s latch collection query
	waitprof	free	yes	x			Tanel’s wait collection query
	tvdxstat	free	yes			x	Trivadis Extended Tracefile Analysis Tool
	spviewer	free	yes	x			this looks interesting for statspack/AWR viewing and comparison
	awr formatter	free	yes	x			chrome plugin  for AWR browsing – see screencast
	snapper	free	yes	x			Tanel’s command line performance analysis
	moats	free	yes	x			character mode top activity screen !
	hotsos tools	??					sql trace analyzer, other stuff
DBA
	Ashviewer	free	yes				collects ASH data itself or uses v$active_session_history – pretty cool
	ASHMon	free	yes				reads ASH data (requires license) unless SASH is installed and pointed to
	MyOra	free		x	x		Never tried it. Looks fast and covers broad functionalitybut UI looks busy
	Mumbai	free	yes	x			integrates snapper and orasrp
	Richmon	free		x
	Lab128	$500/seat	yes	x	x
	DB Optimizer	$1500/seat	yes	x		x	visual sql tuning diagrams
	Quest Spotlight	$1000/cpu		x	x	x
	Quest SQL Optimizer	$1690/seat				x
Enterprise
	Quest Performance Analyzer	$3000/cpu	yes	x	x
	Oracle Diag Pack	$5000/cpu	yes	x	x
	Oracle SQL Tuning Pack	$5000/cpu		x	x
	Confio ignite	$1500/core?		x	x
	Precise Indepth I3	$2000/cpu?		x	x
	Monicle	??
other stuff
	fourth elephant
	DBtuna

(some of the prices I got off of programmers paradise, others are word of mouth, so any clarifications on prices would be appreciated)

The tools marked “yes” are ones that I use or would use.  I would use Quest’s Performance Analyzer given the chance. I’ve never used it but from the demos of the tool, I like what I see.  I have never used Mumbai, but plan to and like again what I see in the demos.

All the other tools marked “yes” I use.

All the tools except “other stuff”, I consider reasonable tools for one job or another. Some are better than others in different ways. The “other stuff” tools I don’t see much point in.

I generally consider OEM with diagnostic pack too expensive and slow, but hey, if customers have it, I’ll use it ! (I had better like it as I designed the performance page and top activity page , though much of what I wanted didn’t make it in) Plus diag pack comes with v$active_session_history and all of AWR which I can query directly with OEM.

I tried to design “DB Optimizer” to be simple to install on my laptop and just point at databases and immediately start monitoring and tuning.  The biggest advantage of “DB Optimizer” over other tools, for me, is the  Visual SQL Tuning diagrams.  Other nice features are being able to load test code by multiple concurrent sessions.  With concurrent sessions running code examples, I can easily demonstrate issues that arise in the database with the profiling page.

But for absolute ease of install and speed, I have to hand it to Lab128. Lab128 runs fast, runs it’s own ASH collection (which doesn’t require diag pack) and has the option to read v$active_session_history as well.

Though Lab128 is fast, collects ASH info and can monitor multiple databases simultaneously for days on end, it still doesn’t allow me a real easily accessible centralized database of performance data. That’s why I created “S-ASH” which can collect ASH data from multiple databases into a central repository where I can run analytic queries or visualize it with ASHMon.

ASHMon and  S-ASH are still rough pieces of code as I spent the last 3 years working solely on DB-Optimizer.

ASHViewer  is a tool that will also read ASH data from Oracle and/or collect ASH on it’s own, which is awesome. ASHviewer can also be hooked up to S-ASH repository with some minor changes. Here are the minor changes (thanks to Marcin Przepiorowski)

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Script libraries

Karl Arao
Tim Gorman

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I’m not so much addressing alerting systems or general NOC montioring systems but those are of interest as well.
zabbix
Big Brother
Big Sister
Xymon
Nagios
ground work
zenoss
Ganglia

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Question – how do you graph data from Grid Control and DB Control? Some nice links from Karl Arao:

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