Bluewolf Remote DBA - Expert DBA Tips

Clearing out alerts in Oracle 10g grid control

Contributor: Jon Tinnirello, Bluewolf Database Administrator

Although the Grid Control database and server monitoring system is powerful and flexible, its cleanup mechanism for stale alerts is almost non-existent. There are undocumented ways of clearing out old alerts that either are no longer relevant or are cluttering up your Grid Control application screens with old information.

The SYSMAN user in the Grid Control repository database holds all of the Grid Control information on databases, servers and their respective settings and alerts. In order to manually delete these old alerts, you must look at the MGMT_SEVERITY table. This table holds information such as the target database, the metric being monitored, the value of that metric, the date it was flagged and the alert message that was given when the alert was flagged.

An Oracle DBA can easily delet the old alert directly from this table by doing a simple query on the date and alert message that was given. As an added precaution, Oracle has a built-in trigger on this table that removes the data related to that stale alert from the other tables in the Grid Control application. Once this data is removed from the database, the alert screen in the Grid Control application can be refreshed to confirm that the stale alert data is gone.