Hi Jim, Alternatively you could have Oracle write to a standard alert_instance.log file and then have that followed and inserted into syslog-ng. There are 2 ways to do this: 1. You could use syslog-ng's ability to follow the individual instance alert log files and then prefix all input from each file with an instance name like Oracle_Instance1, Oracle_Instance2... 2. You could write a script to follow the individual alert log files and input to syslog with whatever priority/facility you like and still have every input tagged like program_instance: message before it even enters syslog. This is what I did for Oracle 9i/10g instances I have since I think that 9i doesn't have syslog capabilities... (although I could be wrong on that) -h Surlow, Jim wrote:

Please provide thoughts and comments –

I’m not a DBA and I’m having our DBAs do further research here, but …

I infer from the Oracle documentation, that Oracle logs to a single syslog facility+level per instance, if configured. And the information in the Oracle log cannot be configured/altered. The downside that I’m seeing is that there is no information in regards to the Oracle instance. So, if I have a box with 20+ instances and I wish to relay this to a central server, all this is going to end up as noise.

My kludge for this, would be to setup the following on each Oracle server:

Instance #1 -> local0.debug

Instance #2 -> local0.info

Instance #3 -> local0.warn

Instance #4 -> local1.debug

Instance #5 -> local1.info

Instance #6 -> local1.warn

Etc.

Then, setup syslog-ng on that Oracle server to use templates (one per instance), to route the data to a single facility & level on our centralized syslog-ng log server and imbed an instance name into the log.

This config sounds really cumbersome. I’m also trying to avoid using Oracle to send the logs to a different instance which would do the consolidation. Does anyone else have a better solution? Am I right in that Oracle will only send to a single facility+level combo regardless of criticality?

Thanks,

Jim

-- Hari Sekhon