DBCollect/AWR Reports

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Overview

By default, dbcollect tries to generate AWR_Reports for each detected and running database instance on the host.

However, creating AWR reports require the Oracle Diagnostics Pack license. This page explains how dbcollect deals with this requirement.

Diagnostics Pack

Diagnostics Pack is a licensed option on top of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It is required to run AWR reports. You can run AWR reports without the license, however, this will be registered in the database and is a licensing violation that can have consequences when customers are audited. Therefore, dbcollect has some safeguards against accidental usage.

Detecting Diagnostics Pack license

It is impossible to detect contract details using automated tools on a host. Therefore, dbcollect checks for previous usage of AWR Reports instead. See Oracle Base - Tracking Database Feature Usage for a detailed explanation and example script.

Currently - the detection is per database - so it is possible to have one database running AWR reports without problems and another one not due to missing AWR usage. This is intentional - a database without prior usage could later be migrated to another host that is not properly licensed and therefore cause issues.

If prior AWR Usage is detected, then either the system is licensed with Diagnostics Pack, or (worst case scenario) the system is in license violation anyway. In both cases, dbcollect will proceed creating AWR reports (unless disabled via CLI parameters)

No prior AWR usage

If no prior AWR usage is detected, then dbcollect will NOT automatically generate AWR reports, but issue an error instead, unless the --force-awr flag is used.