Oracle 21c welcomes the ‘Attention Log’ …
Posted by FatDBA on June 1, 2022
Hi Guys,
Alert log is always been a very important logfile which contain important information about error messages and exceptions that occur during database operations. Its very crucial for any analysis or for troubleshooting any critical event that has happened. Specially over the period of last few years, with all those new database releases, its slowly becoming very messy, loud and has got whole lot of new content added to it that it has to record for all those regular and critical database events, and finally with the inception of Oracle 21c we have the ‘Attention Log‘ that helps to segregate all those critical and vital events which otherwise gets mixed up with other regular incidents of alertlog file.
Each of the database has its own Attention log and is a regular JSON format file which is very easy to translate. Few of the important dimensions or its properties are
URGENCY: Class with possible values INFO, IMMEDIATE etc.
CAUSE : A quick detail about the possible cause or reason.
NOTIFICATION : A regular message in case of any event i.e. “PMON (ospid: 1901): terminating the instance due to ORA error 12752” etc.
ACTION : What possibly you can do
TIME : A timestamp of the event
Let’s see how it looks like!
[oracle@witnessalberta ~]$ !sql
sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL*Plus: Release 21.0.0.0.0 - Production on Fri Apr 8 22:38:25 2022
Version 21.3.0.0.0
Copyright (c) 1982, 2021, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 21c Enterprise Edition Release 21.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 21.3.0.0.0
SQL> set linesize 400 pagesize 400
SQL> col NAME for a30
SQL> col value for a70
SQL>
SQL> select name, value from v$diag_info where value like '%attention%';
NAME VALUE
------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Attention Log /opt/oracle/diag/rdbms/orclcdb/ORCLCDB/trace/attention_ORCLCDB.log
[oracle@witnessalberta trace]$ pwd
/opt/oracle/diag/rdbms/orclcdb/ORCLCDB/trace
[oracle@witnessalberta trace]$
[oracle@witnessalberta trace]$
[oracle@witnessalberta trace]$ ls -ltrh *.log*
-rw-r-----. 1 oracle oinstall 6.0K Apr 8 22:32 attention_ORCLCDB.log
-rw-r-----. 1 oracle oinstall 244K Apr 8 22:34 alert_ORCLCDB.log
[oracle@witnessalberta trace]$
{
"NOTIFICATION" : "Starting ORACLE instance (normal) (OS id: 3309)",
"URGENCY" : "INFO",
"INFO" : "Additional Information Not Available",
"CAUSE" : "A command to startup the instance was executed",
"ACTION" : "Check alert log for progress and completion of command",
"CLASS" : "CDB Instance / CDB ADMINISTRATOR / AL-1000",
"TIME" : "2022-04-08T22:32:47.914-04:00"
}
....
.....
.........
{
"NOTIFICATION" : "Shutting down ORACLE instance (immediate) (OS id: 9724)",
"URGENCY" : "INFO",
"INFO" : "Shutdown is initiated by sqlplus@localhost.ontadomain (TNS V1-V3). ",
"CAUSE" : "A command to shutdown the instance was executed",
"ACTION" : "Check alert log for progress and completion of command",
"CLASS" : "CDB Instance / CDB ADMINISTRATOR / AL-1001",
"TIME" : "2021-09-16T23:11:56.812-04:00"
}
.....
......
........
{
"ERROR" : "PMON (ospid: 1901): terminating the instance due to ORA error 12752",
"URGENCY" : "IMMEDIATE",
"INFO" : "Additional Information Not Available",
"CAUSE" : "The instance termination routine was called",
"ACTION" : "Check alert log for more information relating to instance termination rectify the error and restart the instance",
"CLASS" : "CDB Instance / CDB ADMINISTRATOR / AL-1003",
"TIME" : "2021-09-16T23:34:26.117-02:00"
}
...
.....
......
{
"ERROR" : "PMON (ospid: 3408): terminating the instance due to ORA error 474",
"URGENCY" : "IMMEDIATE",
"INFO" : "Additional Information Not Available",
"CAUSE" : "The instance termination routine was called",
"ACTION" : "Check alert log for more information relating to instance termination rectify the error and restart the instance",
"CLASS" : "CDB Instance / CDB ADMINISTRATOR / AL-1003",
"TIME" : "2022-04-08T23:38:11.258-04:00"
}
Hope It Helped!
Prashant Dixit
Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA 
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