RDA - Oracle Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA)

PURPOSE
=======
RDA is a set of command line diagnostic scripts that are executed by an engine
written in the Perl programming language. RDA is used to gather detailed
information about an Oracle environment; the data gathered is in turn used to
aid in problem diagnosis. The output is also useful for seeing the overall
system configuration.
Oracle Support encourages the use of RDA because it provides a comprehensive
picture of the customer's environment. This can greatly reduce service request
resolution time by minimizing the number of requests from Oracle Customer
Support for more information. RDA is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible;
it does not modify systems in any way, it only collects useful data for Oracle
Customer Support.
CHECKS TO BE DONE BEFORE INSTALLATION
=====================================
Before installing RDA, ensure that the following criteria are met for ease of
use:
1) UNZIP and ZIP utilities must be installed and available on the system.
Therefore, they should be defined as symbols for the user running RDA.
For example: UNZIP == "$sys$login:UNZIP_ALPHA.EXE"
ZIP == "$disk$tools:zip"
If you do not have UNZIP installed in the system, you can download and
install it for free from:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/freeware/freeware.html
2) PERL (versions 5.005 - 5.8.x) utility has be installed and should be
available for the user running RDA 8.x. The required PERL logicals should be
defined in the user environment. Therefore, ensure that only the following
PERL logicals are defined:
"PERLSHR" = mostly ("PERL_ROOT:[000000]PERLSHR.EXE")
"PERL_ROOT" = depends on your environment.
If you do not have PERL installed in your system, you can download and
install it for free from:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ips/apache/csws_modperl.html
3) Once you are sure that both PERL and ZIP/UNZIP are installed and working,
ensure that you run orauser.com for the respective database on which you
wish to run RDA 8.x against. This will set all the database related logicals
such as ORACLE_HOME. Even if you do not run orauser.com, RDA 8.x will still
be able to collect the information related to operating system such as its
version, products installed, and so on.
4) RDA will only be able to collect the Network related information when
standard TCP/IP Services are in use.
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
=========================
To install RDA, extract the zip archive contents into a new directory,
preserving the directory structure of the archive. Do not extract into a
directory that contains an older RDA version.
Example:
unzip rda.zip

Important: Do not extract the contents of the RDA archive (rda.zip) on a

Windows client first. If you do, you will have to remove the ^M characters from
the end of each line in all of the shell scripts in order for them to run. This
is very tedious job. Therefore, unzip only in the VMS system.
You can verify the RDA installation using the following command:
@RDA "-cv"
You can validate if your environment is ready to use RDA by running following
command:
@RDA "-T" "vms"
RUNNING RDA
===========
Before you begin: Log on as the VMS user that owns the Oracle software
installation. In some cases, this user will not have the necessary privileges
to run all of the commands and utilities called by RDA (for example, SYSPRV,
CMKRNL etc.). When you are running RDA to assist in resolving a Service
Request, the analyst will most likely need the information pertaining to the
Oracle software owner. In this case, Oracle support recommends that you run RDA
as the VMS user who owns the Oracle software. An exception to this rule is when
RDA is used to assist in a performance related issue.
1) Choose the RDA command that you will be using depending on your environment:
-- rda.com Use this command to execute RDA with some environment
adaptations to avoid known potential issues.
-- rda.pl Use the following command to verify Perl is installed and
available in the path:
PERL "-V"
RDA options are case sensitive and must be quoted as appropriate.
2) Check the age of the RDA installed by using the following command:
@RDA "-vXRda" "check" "-A"
If it is not a recent build, then download the latest version from the
following My Oracle Support document:
https://support.oracle.com/rs?type=doc&id=314422.1
3) The data collection requires an initial setup to determine which information
should be collected. Enter the following command to initiate the setup:
@RDA "-S"
After setup completes, review the result set definition file output.cfg.
You can also choose to collect only specific data. For more details, view
the command usage help by specifying the "-h" option, or complete manual
page with the "-M" option.
4) At this point, you can collect diagnostic information. When a database
collection is requested, ensure that SQL*Plus is able to connect to the
database with the user name that you specified during the setup. Start the
data collection using the following command:

@RDA "-v"
The "-v" option is optional. It allows you to view the collection progress.
5) The output is a set of HTML files that are located in the RDA result set
directory. By default, RDA saves the result set definition in output.cfg and
puts the collection result in the output directory. By default, both are
located in the current working directory. You can review the data collected,
starting with:
[<result_set_name>]RDA__start.htm
Please note: Do not submit any health, payment card or other sensitive
production data that requires protections greater than those specified in
the Oracle GCS Security Practices (http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/
customer-support-security-practices-069170.pdf). Information on how to
remove data from your submission is available at
https://support.oracle.com/rs?type=doc&id=1227943.1
6) The final output is also packaged in an archive located in the same
directory than the result set definition file. The packaged output file will
have a .zip extension (for example, RDA_<result_set_name>_<host>.zip). If
the data collection was generated to assist in resolving a Service Request,
send the report archive to Oracle Support by uploading the file via
My Oracle Support. When transferring the file with ftp, be sure to ftp in
BINARY format. Do not rename the file, as the file name helps Oracle Support
to quickly identify that RDA output is attached to the service request.
It is impossible to tell how long RDA will take to execute, as it depends on
many variables, such as system activity, the options chosen, network settings,
etc. On an average system, RDA takes just a few minutes to run. Most scripts
are designed to stop if for some reason they cannot complete within 30 seconds,
(for example, the lsnrctl status command will stop if the listener is hung).
It is not unusual for RDA to take 15 minutes or more on a very busy server,
especially if there are many Oracle listener processes active.
If you must run data collection for specific modules again, for example the
OS and DBA modules, then you can run the following command:
@RDA "-vCRP" "OS.OS" "DB.DBA"
RDA maintains the list of modules that are already collected. If you want RDA
to collect all data again using the same setup, then you can execute the
following command:
@RDA "-vCRPf" or @RDA "-vf"
You can force RDA to define another collection using system defaults instead of
the previous collection settings in two ways:
Deleting or renaming the "output.cfg" file before running:
@RDA "-S"
or
Running the following RDA command:
@RDA "-Sfn"
Currently this utility is written in the English language only, including the
built in documentation.

PLATFORMS SUPPORTED
===================
At this time, the scripts are supported on the following VMS platforms:
-- HP OpenVMS Alpha 7.3-2 and above
-- HP Itanium
RDA can also be executed on other platforms. However, if
Oracle Support recommends to test it on a non-production
execution performance is unpredictable. For example, you
when RDA attempts to run utilities and commands that are
platforms.

you want to do this,

server first, as its
will receive errors
not supported on those

PRODUCTS SUPPORTED
==================
RDA collects information that is useful for troubleshooting issues in the
following areas:
----------

Installation/configuration issues
Performance issues
ORA-600, ORA-7445, ORA-3113, and ORA-4031 errors
Upgrade, migration, and linking issues
Developer issues
Oracle Database issues
Oracle Application Server/Fusion Middleware issues
Oracle Enterprise Manager issues
Other corrective issues

SPECIAL NOTES ON USERIDS AND PASSWORDS

======================================
As a means of providing higher security when using RDA, passwords are no longer
stored in plain text in the setup.txt file. As result, RDA prompts for the
required passwords when collecting the data.
If the Perl implementation installed on your operating system supports it, RDA
will suppress the character echo during password requests. When the character
echo is suppressed, the password is requested twice for verification. If both
entered passwords do not match after three attempts, the request is canceled.
RDA can perform OS authentication, which eliminates having to enter a password
for database information gathering. It also accepts "/" as a user name to
avoid entering a password when RDA is gathering database information.
For executing RDA at regularly scheduled intervals via batch jobs, passwords
can be encoded inside the result set definition file. For instance, to encode
the system password, use the following command:
@RDA "-A" "system"
The password will be requested interactively.
SPECIAL NOTES ON OUTPUT DIRECTORY
=================================
To limit security vulnerabilities, the permissions of the RDA output directory
should be set as restrictive as possible. The output directory could contain
sensitive configuration information and, when no other mechanism is available,
temporary data collection files.
SPECIAL NOTES ON SECURITY
=========================

The RDA report, which is sent to Oracle Support for diagnostic reasons, can
contain sensitive information such as IP addresses and user names. RDA allows
the user to remove sensitive data from the reports before communicating
externally. Following are the options which RDA offers to mask sensitive data
in the reports.
The Security profile to turn on filtering. It can be combined with other
profiles:
@RDA "-S" "-pDB11g-Security"
The previous command sets up RDA for the DB11g profile and turns on filtering
through the Security profile.
To enable filtering for an existing setup:
@RDA "-XFilter" "enable"
If the user want to know what exactly RDA is collecting, the RDA code is
readable to the user and it is available in the "collect" directory structure.
TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS
=====================
If RDA is unable to connect to the database, and the user is declared as a
SYSDBA user when running the setup, ensure that connections are possible with
that user using AS SYSDBA. For example, if SYSTEM is specified as the user name,
make sure that you can connect using the following command in SQL*Plus:
connect system AS SYSDBA
If you cannot connect, run the setup again and answer N to that question, or
edit the result set definition file and set B_SYSDBA=0. You can also use the
"TMdb" test module to obtain more elements on the connection problem.
If you run RDA for an issue that involves multiple tiers (for example,
Application Server, Database Server, OLAP/Express Drive, OID, etc.) and the
tiers are on separate servers, then you must run RDA on each server associated
with the issue that you are troubleshooting. Data for these tiers will not be
collected unless RDA is run on the server that the product resides on.
If you are running RDA for an issue that involves products under different
ORACLE_HOME directories but the same server, you must run RDA multiple times,
once for each ORACLE_HOME that is involved in the issue that you are
troubleshooting. It is possible to have multiple result sets (see option "-s").
RDA has N_TIMEOUT and N_SQL_TIMEOUT settings, which allows to limit the
execution time of operating system commands and SQL scripts respectively. This
is done to avoid situations in which RDA could hang because the execution of a
query would never complete. However, this feature depends on the operating
system capability to interrupt any tasks and should not always be operational.
If RDA was not able to execute a specific script, it might be a timeout issue.
You can try to increase these parameters in the result set definition file.
There could be situations in which some queries would take longer than 30
seconds to complete execution. In these cases, do the following to increase
the N_TIMEOUT or N_SQL_TIMEOUT parameter:
1) Change directory to the directory where the result set definition file is
stored.
2) Use an editor to edit the result set definition file (output.cfg by default).

3) Change the value of N_TIMEOUT or N_SQL_TIMEOUT in the [DEFAULT] section to a

value greater than 30.
4) Re-run RDA (possibly limited to impacted modules).
5) It may be necessary to increase this value several times in order for the
query to complete in the allotted time.
You can also change the settings at execution time by using an option like
"-eDFT/N_TIMEOUT=<n>,DFT/N_SQL_TIMEOUT=<n>" where <n> represents the new limit.
When you run orauser.com against 10g databases, it automatically sets Perl
logicals (e.g. PERL_ENV_TABLES). Once you execute orauser.com in such an
environment, you have two PERL_ROOT, and so on: one for process level and other
system wide. Perl could have difficulties to collect environment information if
PERL_ENV_TABLES is present but typically does not contain CRTL_ENV on top of
value list. A possible workaround is to deassign PERL_ENV_TABLES.
Perl 5.6 could have a problem of executing operating system commands when
outputs are flushed automatically. When the occurs, it can be disabled by
editing the result set definition file and by setting
RDA_FLUSH=0
When executing rda.pl directly, always define the following logical for best
results:
DECC$FILE_SHARING = ENABLE
Options requiring forking (e.g. background collections) are not available
on VMS.
Under certain circumstances, RDA generates an error in a RDA-nnnnn format. You
can discover the meaning and possible solution to the error by using the "-E"
option. For example,
@RDA "-E" "RDA-00014"
HOW TO REPORT PROBLEMS
======================
If problems running RDA cannot be fixed with the troubleshooting steps
described above, you can file a Service Request in My Oracle Support.
Information on how to create an RDA Service Request is available at
https://support.oracle.com/rs?type=doc&id=1554251.1
Please include:
-- The description of the error, including the error number and messages.
-- The output of:
-- The output of:
@RDA "-c"
@RDA "-V"
show cpu
show proc/all
sh log *
sh symbol/local/all
sh symbol/global/all
When possible, re-run the RDA program with debug and trace mode enabled and
upload the output in the Service Request. For instance:
@RDA "-vt99"

(for whole data collection)

@RDA "-vt90" "T/<module>" (for a single module)

For database connection problems, include the output of
@RDA "-T" "T/TMdb"
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================
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================
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==============================
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