Lab128 - Features

Real time monitoring.

• The most important Oracle performance data is conveniently presented in the Instance Main window, helping to assess the instance state at a glance. This data can be drilled down to the detailed info with one mouse click;
• The Sessions Details window provides the following info: session OS PID, session's current wait, list of opened cursors and their SQL text, selected session statistics values (either cumulative or delta), number of locked objects, progress of long operations and much more;
• Tablespaces / Datafiles data along with I/O data are shown in Tablespaces and Datafiles window;
• The Locks and Locked Objects window helps to troubleshoot the lock contention;
• Segments, segments' statistics and Extents map are show in the Segments and Extents window;
• Block Buffers distribution by objects, object type, tablespace/datafile, owner, status, etc. can be seen in Block Buffers Explorer window. Changes in the distribution between snapshots are shown too;
• The SQL Area window helps to identify top resource consuming SQL statements;
• Explain Plan form conveniently called with a single click from many windows and provides sophisticated view of execution plan with selected detail level including cost, distribution, predicates, projections and SQL plan statistics;
• The Oracle latches data is presented in a graphical and tabular form in the Latch Details window;
• Transactions and corresponding Undo / Rollback segments presented in the Transaction window help to tune and troubleshot transactions;
• Long operations with the progress bar are shown in Session Longops window;
• Temporary tablespaces usage is presented in the Temp Segments window;
• The Instances Overview window lists all connected Oracle instances providing critical information about each instance and helping to monitor the status of several instances;
• The Top Processes window presents the output of 'top' command joined with Oracle sessions data. There are administrative options available for the selected process. A series of snapshots from 'pstack' can be taken for the selected process and then mapped to the Explain plan steps exposing which parts of execution plan the process is spending time;
• The Alert log file can be viewed real-time. The incoming information is preprocessed identifying important events and placing them into the navigation list;

Analyzing past performance.

• Response time-based and system-wide tuning are both supported by using high-resolution data collection from Oracle performance views. The information is aggregated and assembled into graphical and tabulated charts, providing intuitive and comprehensive insight into Oracle functioning, both current and historical;
• The performance data from more than 1000 Oracle statistics is collected automatically with 6 seconds time resolution and hours or days long history. This data is immediately available for analysis, helping to troubleshoot the most difficult Oracle performance problems;
• The snapshots of v$sql are collected providing top SQL statements for any chosen time period. It also provides basis for individual SQL statement tracking and charting;
• The Active Session History (ASH) functionality is implemented in the application, providing collection of active session wait data, capturing SQL text and other relevant data to support Response time-based tuning. Older Oracle versions 8, 9 are also supported. Oracle 10g, 11g ASH can be optionally used to pre-populate data;
• The SQL statistics collection - frequent v$sql or v$sqlstats snapshots are captured and implemented in the application, providing support for SQL statistics-based tuning. This is a revolutionary new technique which complements, if not supersedes, ASH-based tuning;
• The individual SQL statements can be explored in detail in the SQL Statement window. The most thorough delta statistics and charts are available for any moment in the past;
• The Activity Explorer window provides powerful insight into Oracle activity, current and historical. It quickly displays performance bottlenecks and identifies resources and individual SQL statements responsible for delays in server response at any current or historical period;
• The Session History window shows past active sessions and session details such as SQL text, waits details, blocking sessions etc;
• Each performance statistic can be shown in the detailed chart window and can be combined with other statistics to form user-defined charts;
• Data from charts can be exported into the clipboard or comma-separated file for the analysis in third party tools;
• The charts can be copied into the clipboard as a picture in a bitmap format;
• The statistics Correlation analysis can be performed by drawing two statistics, one against the other in the Correlation charts;
• The performance data can be stored automatically into the files. These files can be later opened and analyzed using same time resolution and precision;

Oracle Cluster (RAC) support.

• All windows with real-time data are RAC-enabled. They provide system-wide (all instances) view on data; likewise, any instance can be selected to narrow the scope of troubleshooting.
• When several monitors are opened and connected to instances of same RAC database, there is an option of not using GV$ views. GV$ views are more expensive to the monitored instances and sometimes have performance bugs. This setting is recommended for very busy databases. The information from different instances is combined internally, providing same functionality;
• When several monitors are opened and connected to instances of same RAC database, common data sets (objects, segments, extents etc.) are shared between monitors to conserve memory used by Lab128;

Reports.

• There are many dozens of reports on various areas of database status and instance activity;
• The Statspack-style report is available instantaneously on any arbitrary time interval;
• Easy interface for AWR and ASH reports;
• All reports can be exported into MS Word or as HTML files;

Built-in SQL editor for query troubleshooting and ad-hoc administration.

• The multi-page editor with keyword highlighter;
• Concurrent non-blocking SQL execution;
• Autotrace (SQL execution statistics) option;
• Support for SQL execution with Plan Statistics collection enabled. The collected statistics are shown combined with the traditional presentation of execution plan for easy interpretation;
• Innovative "pipelined" style of presenting the explain/execution plan;

Other features.

• Lab128 is very simple to install - just extract files from install.zip into some directory and run lab128.exe. There are no agents or stored database objects needed for Lab128;
• The administrator privilege is not required to run Lab128;
• Lab128 uses Oracle Call Interface (OCI) - part of Oracle client software. Alternatively, only two Dynamic-link library (DLL) files can be placed into Lab128 directory providing full functionality on the computers with no Oracle software installed. These two files can be downloaded from Oracle or Lab128 web site;
• Lab128 has built-in Secure Shell (SSH) client support, which can be used to connect to the hosts running Oracle instances. SSH connection provides OS-level performance information;
• The broken connection to the Oracle or SSH connection is automatically detected, reported and recovered;
• Lab128 is extendible: the set of measurement queries against Oracle instance can be extended with user-defined queries;
• The ratios and derived statistics set can be extended with user-defined ratios and derived statistics;
• The impact on the monitored system is very low because Lab128 uses simple queries against Oracle and does joins and aggregations internally in the application;
• Lab128 is lighting fast. It is written on C/C++ and has very small footprint for the application of this class;