Monitoring FAQ

General questions

What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring provides your enterprise with fine grained metrics and notifications to monitor your entire stack. Out of the box performance and health metrics are provided for your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Additionally, alarms can be created on these metrics using industry standard statistics, trigger operators, and time intervals. Alarms alert you in real time to important changes across your cloud infrastructure and services via the Notifications service. You can also emit, visualize, and create alarms on your own custom metrics to monitor all of your metrics in one place. Monitoring offers a best-in-class metric engine, allowing you to perform powerful aggregation and slice-and-dice queries across multiple metric streams and dimensions in real time.

What are the benefits of Monitoring?

Using Monitoring, you are able to understand the health and performance of your cloud infrastructure and services. Monitoring gives you the insight needed to optimize resource utilization, and respond to anomalies in real time.

How do I view or retrieve Monitoring metrics?

Monitoring metrics are available in the console as time series charts. You can query metrics with the SDK, CLI and API. The getting started section for Resource Monitoring in the Service Essentials documentation provides an overview on retrieving metrics and viewing charts.

The Console provides three Monitoring metrics views:

1. View default metric charts for a resource The console displays the last hour of metric data for the selected resource. A chart is shown for each metric emitted by the selected resource.
2. View default metric charts for a set of resources: The Service Metrics page displays the default charts for all resources in a compartment and metric namespace. This data can be filtered using dimensions.
3. Create a metric chart from a one or more queries: Metrics Explorer supports multiple queries, each with user specified statistic, filter on dimensions, and interval. Metrics Explorer also includes an Advanced Mode to create and view queries using the Monitoring Query Language (MQL).

How do I create and view Alarms?

Monitoring alarms can be created and viewed in the console as well as the via the SDK, CLI and API. Detailed instructions on how to configure and use alarms is available In the Monitoring alarms documentation. Monitoring uses Notifications to send the alerts to the destinations you specify.

In the console, the Monitoring Alarm Status page provides a summary of your alarms that are currently firing.

Which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services emit metrics to Monitoring?

The supported services that have resources or components that can emit metrics are listed in the Monitoring supported services section of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure online documentation. Each service provides key metrics specific to the type of resource. Details on the metrics provided, a definition of the metric, and dimensions available are noted in the documentation. The list of supported services will continue to expand over time.

What set-up is required to generate metrics from my Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services?

Metrics are generated out of the box for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services. There are some prerequisites related to IAM policies required to view metrics. For a list of the services that provide metrics, consult the list of supported services. Compute instances require an OracleCloudAgent to enable Monitoring. The OracleCloudAgent is provided by default for new instances. For existing instances, you can install the OracleCloudAgent. Details on the OracleCloudAgent and how to confirm if it is already installed are available in the Compute Monitoring documentation.

Can I send my own metrics to Monitoring?

You can publish your own custom metrics to Monitoring using the API. Custom metrics can be charted in console, and retrieved using the API. The Monitoring console and API also support configuring alarms based on your custom metrics.

The Metrics Explorer page in the console allows you view your custom metrics alongside those provided by resources.

What are the limits associated with Monitoring?

The Monitoring limits are available in the Monitoring section of the Monitoring limits.

Where can I find more information on Monitoring?

Refer to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation for more information on how to get started with and use Monitoring.

Billing

How much does Monitoring cost?

Monitoring usage is billed according to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring pricing. Billing is based on two dimensions:

1. Metric ingestion: You will be charged for custom metric data points sent to OCI Monitoring. There are no charges for metrics provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services in OCI-prefixed namespaces as they do not count toward metrics ingested.
2. Metric retrieval: You will pay for data points analyzed when retrieved from Monitoring for visualization or for Alarms evaluation. In addition, you will also be charged for the number of metric data points moved from the monitoring service using Oracle Connector Hub to a supported target service.

What is a data point?

YA metric data point is defined as one value (with its timestamp) in a metric stream ingested into the Monitoring API. Example: 2018-05-10T22:19:00Z, 10.4

What is an analyzed metric data point?

An analyzed metric data point is a data point per minute per metric stream on a Monitoring metric retrieval query. Thus, several metric data points within a minute interval are digested and counted as one analyzed metric data point. Note that each minute interval with zero metric data points will count as one analyzed metric data point. For a given query the GET/Query operation computation cost is linearly proportional to the length of time and number of metric streams.

What is a metric stream?

A metric stream is an individual set of aggregated data for a metric. A stream can be either specific to a single resource or aggregated across all resources in the compartment.