How to monitor backup jobs on Oracle 11g?

Background:

I'm trying to monitor that backups run as expected on several databases. Zenoss is used to monitor most other stuff.

A couple of KPIs are already monitored using Zenoss in combination with script that runs sqlplus on database host.

What I've found so far:

Views in database:

• V$RMAN_STATUS

• V$RMAN_BACKUP_JOB_DETAILS;

• V$RMAN_BACKUP_SUBJOB_DETAILS;

Stop gap solution:

Sending alerts from Enterprise Manager:

• Setup > Monitoring Templates > Create > Target : some Database > Metric Threshold > Failed Job Count

or

• Preferences > Rules > Create > Tab "General" - Target Type: Database Instance, Tab "Jobs" - Specific Jobs > Add Specific Jobs: Select the job and Job Status: "Problem"

What I'd like to know:

• Does this seem reasonable or is there another preferred way to integrate monitoring of Oracle into a third party nms? (Polling is preferred to traps in the current setting. )

• Pitfalls to be aware of.

• There seems to be significant differences between the database views I mentioned and what I see in EM backup history. Where should I be looking for the status of past backups?

I might have found a couple of answers on my own. Posting them here in case others need to know:

• Google (or my google skills) seems to be getting increasingly less reliable.

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Searching the forums at https://forums.oracle.com/ I found this thread: https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=9956411, which references http://www.morganslibrary.org/reference/dba_best_practices.html. Here is the code mentioned:

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SELECT start_time, end_time, input_type, input_type, status
FROM v$rman_backup_job_details
ORDER BY 1;

and

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SELECT vbd.file#, vrbjd.start_time, vrbjd.end_time, vbd.incremental_level, vrbjd.input_type, vrbjd.status
FROM v$rman_backup_job_details vrbjd, v$backup_datafile vbd
WHERE vbd.completion_time BETWEEN vrbjd.start_time AND vrbjd.end_time
AND vrbjd.input_type <> 'ARCHIVELOG'
ORDER BY 2,1;

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As for why the query in Enterprise Manager picked older jobs I learned a nice trick from someone at work: You can read recent queries from the view v$sqlarea. Something like select sql_text from v$sqlarea order by last_active_time desc should do the trick.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#7613, answer score: 2