The Triora Group

As a kid I always read the sides of the cereal box where it mentioned the Recommended Daily Allowance for various food, vitamins and such. For that reason that acronym, RDA, will always stick in my mind.

But today we are talking about a different RDA, the Oracle kind. I’ve recently spent some time exploring the wonders of the Remote Diagnostic Agent and thought I would pass on my thoughts.

For those unfamiliar with RDA, it’s a PERL script (Perl 5.005 and later) that you can download from Oracle. Oracle likes to use it to gather support information for your site when you have an SR. However there is also value for your in-house operations from running it regularly. The Metalink information (metalink.oracle.com) information for getting started is at Note:314422.1. Information about options for RDA are found under Note:330760.1.

The download of RDA (without the System Configuration Manager Collector) is less than 5MB in size. The latest version of RDA from March of 2008, is designed to execute on all of the platforms listed below.

Once installed you answer some questions and send it off to gather information about your environment. The result is two-fold. You get a lot of TXT and HTML files that output. If you pull up the right HTML file (RDA__start.htm) you can browse through information about your database, server, Java, applications tier, forms and just about anything else you ever wanted to know. And it’s all nicely formatted in HTML with drill-down links.

I like RDA because it’s Oracle supported, offers lots of reporting options, is relatively unobtrusive and provides easy to read results. You can run it on just about any version of the Database or Oracle Applications or Operating System and it is smart enough to figure out where to go and what to gather.

Here’s a graphic showing a sample main screen.

What is shown here is only the top part of the actual page and as you can see on the left there is lots of links for drill-down research. Keep in mind that this sample only shows a subset of information that can be reported on because there are lots of options.

RDA has a number of options that determine what type of information it will gather. Here’s an overview list of areas it can report on, but keep in mind that Oracle is regularly extending the capabilities of RDA and may have new options when you next look.

• Oracle RDBMS Server (Standard and Enterprise Editions)
• Oracle RAC Cluster (Single/Multiple Nodes, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Cluster File System, Data Guard)
• Oracle Application Server (iAS 1.0.2.x/9.0.x/10.1.2.x/10.1.3.x,10.1.4.x, HTTP Server,WebCache,J2EE/OC4J)
• Oracle Oracle Data Integrator
• Oracle Management Server and Intelligent Agent (Grid Server, Agent Server, DB Control)
• OLAP Products (Express Server, Financial Analyzer, and Demand Planning Server)
• Oracle Developer (Forms and Reports)
• Oracle JDBC/PRO *C/ODBC and other development client related information
• Oracle Collaboration Suites (Email Server,Calendar,Discussions,Content Services,Workspaces,WebClient, and Wireless)
• Oracle Identity Management (Internet Directory and COREid)
• Oracle Networking products
• Oracle Ebusiness Suite 11i and 12
• Oracle Portal Software 7.0, 7.2, and 7.3
• Oracle Retail (Retek)

RDA is currently available for the following environments:

• IBM AIX
• Intel Linux (Oracle Enterprise, RedHat, and SuSE)
• HP-UX (10.* and 11.*)
• HP Tru64
• Linux PPC
• Mac OS X/Darwin
• Sequent Dynix/Ptx
• Sun Solaris (2.6 - 2.10)
• Windows XP Professional
• Windows 2000 Workstation and Server
• Windows 2003 Server
• HP OpenVMS Alpha 7.3-2 and above
• HP OpenVMS Itanium
• ZLinux

One interesting feature about RDA is that it will RDA allow you to remove sensitive data from RDA reports by using a specific setting.

RDA uses Data Collection Modules (DCM), that you specify when running it, to determine which information to report on. Here are just a few of the approximately 80 DCM’s that you can specify.

But wait! There’s more!

RDA also offers options for running several tools. One tool will run the Oracle Database Diagnostic Collector and another will diagnose ORA-600 Oracle Internal Errors. It also has some test modes that it support (10+) that will test SQL Settings or local database access or…

Well, as you can see RDA is something of real value if you spend some time and get familiar with its options. Understanding the power of RDA benefit you both internally and also as a tool to improve sending information for Oracle Support. So with that in mind, be sure to get your RDA…

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