I couldn’t find any decent documentation online about getting Zabbix configured with an Oracle backend so I decided to write one myself. The oracle installation section of this guide is based on John Smileys guide (available here), but has been adapted for 11GR2.
As usual I’ll be basing this on a CentOS 5.4 i386 installation. Please note that to install Oracle you need to have X11 installed. The requirements for an x64 installation are a little different. I prefer to use X11 forwarding over SSH when it’s available I also need to note here that you can’t use su and then have X11 forwarding work.
For the record, I’ve never used the Oracle Database product before this week, so I’m sure there’s bad practices all over the place. If there is leave a comment and I’ll sort out my mistakes.
Oracle Overview
For those of you, who like me haven’t had to touch oracle before, I’ve drawn up a pretty picture which outlines how Oracle hangs together in terms of database design and storage.
Oracle ASM is the Automated Storage management, which is capable of handling disk redundancy if requested.
For those who have come from the land of MSSQL or MYSQL, the structure and terminology can get a bit confusing so I’ll explain it here:
In MSSQL you have an Instance, which can contain multiple databases, with each database having its own file for storage. In Oracle the Instance is called a Database. Each Oracle Database can contain multiple tablespaces, each tablespace can have one or multiple Datafiles assosciated with it which can be located on either an OS partition or an ASM Instance. Oracle does not have “databases” in the same concept that MSSQL does, instead each user has a default tablespace and a schema assosciated to the user. For example, in MSSQL you could have a database called ZABBIXDB, and a user with permission to access this database. In Oracle you have a user (ZABBIXDBUSER) with a quota in one or more tablespaces. Each user has a default tablespace to store tables in, and each table is labeled zabbixdbuser.tablename. If you wanted to store a table on another tablespace you would use zabbixdbuser.tablename on tablespace.
Oracle Installation
In terms of physical hardware, I have a Dell PE2650 with 5 72GB SCSI drives installed, the first two are in a RAID1 and the other three are passed directly to the OS to be managed by ASM. I would highly recommend looking at the system requirements here.
All of the commands that I list here in black will need to be run as root, the oracle user will be in dark green, and the zabbix user will be in dark blue.
Downloads Required
If you are going to be using Oracle ASM you’ll need to download the following from here.
oracleasm-2.6.18-164.15.1.el5PAE-2.0.5-1.el5.i686.rpm <- This needs to match your uname -r
oracleasmlib-2.0.4-1.el5.i386.rpm
oracleasm-support-2.1.3-1.el5.i386.rpm
linux_11gR2_grid.zip
For the Oracle Database Instance you’ll need to download the following files from here.
linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip
Prerequisites for Oracle Installation
Run the following command to install the packages that Oracle needs
yum install compat-libstdc++-33 elfutils-libelf elfutils-libelf-devel glibc glibc-devel glibc-common gcc gcc-c++ kernel-headers libgcc libaio libaio-devel libstdc++ libstdc++-devel unixODBC unixODBC-devel sysstat binutils make sysstat pdksh
These are the kernel parameters that Oracle requires:
cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf << EOF kernel.shmall = 2097152 kernel.shmmax = 536870912 kernel.shmmni = 4096 kernel.semopm = 100 kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128 fs.file-max = 6915744 net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 9000 65500 net.core.rmem_default = 4194304 net.core.wmem_default = 262144 net.core.rmem_max = 4194304 net.core.wmem_max = 1048576 fs.aio-max-nr = 1048576 EOF sysctl -p
User and Groups:
groupadd oinstall groupadd dba useradd -m -g oinstall -G dba oracle mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app chmod -R 775 /u01/app passwd oracle
I ran into issues with the Oracle root scripts with SELinux enabled.
setenforce permissive sed -i 's/enforcing/permissive/g' /etc/sysconfig/selinux
More Oracle User requirements:
cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf << EOF oracle soft nproc 2047 oracle hard nproc 16384 oracle soft nofile 1024 oracle hard nofile 65536 EOF
cat >> /etc/pam.d/login << EOF session required pam_limits.so EOF
cat >> /etc/profile <<EOF if [ \$USER = "oracle" ]; then if [ \$SHELL = "/bin/ksh" ]; then ulimit -p 16384 ulimit -n 65536 else ulimit -u 16384 -n 65536 fi umask 022 fi EOF
cat >> /etc/csh.login <<EOF if ( \$USER == "oracle" ) then limit maxproc 16384 limit descriptors 65536 umask 022 endif EOF
ASM Installation
Install the RPMs that we downloaded
rpm -ivh oracleasm-*.rpm oracleasmlib-2.0.4-1.el5.i386.rpm oracleasm-support-2.1.3-1.el5.i386.rpm
We then need to configure the ASM service:
service oracleasm configure
User:oracle
group:dba
onboot:yes
scanonboot:yes
We’ll then need to label our disks for ASM. You will need to preformat the drives before labelling.
service oracleasm createdisk VOL1 /dev/sdb1 service oracleasm createdisk VOL2 /dev/sdc1 service oracleasm createdisk VOL3 /dev/sdd1 chkconfig oracleasm on
Now we can finally get around to installing ASM. Remember that you need X11 forwarding turned on if you’re doing this over SSH, or you need to have X started if you’re doing this locally.
unzip linux_11gR2_grid.zip
cd grid
./runInstaller
-Install and Configure Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server
-Configure ASM disks as required
-Configure Passwords as required
-Chose dba group for all groups
-Assuming you’ve followed the above, prerequisites shouldn’t be an issue.
-Install
-Run scripts as requested as the root user
Oracle Database Installation
unzip linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
unzip linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip
cd database
./runInstaller
-Install and Configure a Database
-Server Class
-Single instance Database Installation
-Advanced Install
-Enterprise Edition
-Default Install Location
-General Purpose
-Default Configuration Options
-In Management, goto Character Sets then select Use Unicode (AL32UTF8) – This is needed for nvarchar2 column size of >2000
-Insert your ASMSNMP Password if you are using ASM, else select where you want to store your database.
-No Automated Backups
-Set Passwords as Required
-Install
-Run scripts as requested as root, if you get a prompt to overwrite files in /usr/local/sbin/ you can overwrite them.
Database Configuration
We need to set a number on ENVVARs across the server for the zabbix, apache and oracle users. I spent a good 2 days trying to figure out why zabbix_server couldn’t see the database. I would suggest either logging out and logging back in after setting these as we’ll be using them shortly, or just set them manually.
cat >>/etc/profile << EOF export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 export ORACLE_SID=orcl export EDITOR=vim export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin EOF cat >> /etc/sysconfig/httpd << EOF export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 export ORACLE_SID=orcl export EDITOR=vim export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin EOF
Last thing we need to do is set the database to startup automatically.
In your /etc/oratab you will have something similar to the following, change the :N at the end of the line to be a :Y.
orcl:/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1:YThen we need to add the following script to startup the database on boot:
cat >> /etc/init.d/oraboot << EOF
#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 345 99 10
# description: Oracle auto start-stop script.
#
# Set ORA_HOME to be equivalent to the $ORACLE_HOME
# from which you wish to execute dbstart and dbshut;
#
# Set ORA_OWNER to the user id of the owner of the
# Oracle database in ORA_HOME.
ORA_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
ORA_OWNER=oracle
if [ ! -f $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart ]
then
echo "Oracle startup: cannot start"
exit
fi
case "$1" in
'start')
# Start the Oracle databases:
# The following command assumes that the oracle login
# will not prompt the user for any values
su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start"
su - $ORA_OWNER -c $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart
touch /var/lock/subsys/dbora
;;
'stop')
# Stop the Oracle databases:
# The following command assumes that the oracle login
# will not prompt the user for any values
su - $ORA_OWNER -c $ORA_HOME/bin/dbshut
su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop"
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/dbora
;;
esac
EOF
chkconfig --add oraboot
chkconfig oraboot on
Zabbix Installation
Download Zabbix from here.
Setting up the Database
Now we need to create the Zabbix database user, give the user a quota on the tablespace and grant a few extra permissions.
sqlplus / as sysdba
CREATE USER "ZABBIXDBUSER" PROFILE "DEFAULT" IDENTIFIED BY "**********" ACCOUNT UNLOCK;
GRANT "CONNECT","RESOURCE" TO "ZABBIXDBUSER";
ALTER USER "ZABBIXDBUSER" QUOTA UNLIMITED ON "USERS";
ALTER USER "ZABBIXDBUSER" QUOTA 0 on "SYSAUX";
ALTER USER "ZABBIXDBUSER" QUOTA 0 on "SYSTEM";
REVOKE UNLIMITED TABLESPACE FROM "ZABBIXDBUSER";
GRANT CREATE ANY DIRECTORY TO "ZABBIXDBUSER";
GRANT DROP ANY DIRECTORY TO "ZABBIXDBUSER";
Exit
cd zabbix-1.8.2/create sed -i 's%/home/zabbix/zabbix/create%'$PWD'%g' data/p_w_picpaths_oracle.sql
If you forgot to set the Character Set for the database, you can run the following command to change the nvarchar2 size.
sed -i 's/2048/2000/g' schema/oracle.sql
You can run the following as root so long as the ENVVARs have been set. The set def off command bypasses the & character, which would normally be used in a sqlplus script to prompt you for a variable.
sqlplus zabbixdbuser/**** set def off @schema/oracle.sql @data/data.sql @data/p_w_picpaths_oracle.sql exit cd ..
Prerequisites
Add the Oracle libraries to ldconfig
echo $ORACLE_HOME > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf ldconfig
The following are the requirements for each of the Zabbix configure options
–with-jabber
Download and install ikesemel and isekemel-devel from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/iksemel/
–with-libcurl
yum install curl curl-devel
–with-net-snmp
yum install net-snmp net-snmp-devel
–with-ssh2
yum install openssl-devel zlib-devel
Download and install libssh2 and libssh2-devel from ftp://ftp.pramberger.at/systems/linux/contrib/rhel5/i386/
–with-ldap
yum install openldap-devel openldap
–with-openipmi
yum install OpenIPMI OpenIPMI-devel
If you are planning on using fping to monitor any of your hosts download the RPM from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/fping/, install and then
chmod +s /usr/sbin/fping chmod +s /usr/sbin/fping6
Compilation & Installation of zabbix_server
./configure --enable-server --enable-ipv6 --with-jabber --with-libcurl --with-unixodbc --with-net-snmp --with-ssh2 --with-ldap --with-openipmi --with-oracle=$ORACLE_HOME make && make install chmod a+x misc/init.d/redhat/8.0/zabbix_server sed -i 's%/usr/local/zabbix/bin%/usr/local/sbin/%g misc/init.d/redhat/8.0/zabbix_server cp zabbix-1.8.2/misc/init.d/redhat/8.0/zabbix_server /etc/init.d/
If you look at my previous post I had written a init script for CentOS that causes the zabbix_server service to delay on booting since the database can take a while to register with the TNS Listener.
chkconfig --add zabbix_server chkconfig zabbix_server on adduser zabbix mkdir /etc/zabbix/ cp zabbix-1.8.2/misc/conf/zabbix_server /etc/zabbix/ chown -R zabbix:zabbix /etc/zabbix chmod 770 /etc/zabbix chmod 660 /etc/zabbix/* mkdir /var/log/zabbix chown zabbix:zabbix /var/log/zabbix chmod 775 /var/log/zabbix
Set the following in your /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf. Even though the DBHost is supposed to default to localhost, you should still set it to your hostname. The DBName must match the service name in $TNS_ADMIN\tnsnames.ora
LogFile=/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log
LogFileSize=10
DBHost=zabbix
DBName=orcl.fqdn.name
DBUser=zabbixdbuser
DBPassword=*******
DBPort=1521
Su to your zabbix user then run the following to make sure that it can connect successfully to the database.
zabbix_server
tail /var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log
Zabbix PHP Frontend Configuration
cp zabbix-1.8.2/frontends/php/* /var/www/html -R yum install httpd php php-devel php-bcmath php-gd php-mbstring php-ldap php-xml wget http://pecl.php.net/get/oci8 tar -xzvf oci8 cd oci8-1.4.1 phpize ./configure make && make install
Setup your /etc/php.ini with the following:
date.timezone = Your TZ according to this.
memory_limit = 256M
max_input_time = 600
max_execution_time = 600
post_max_size = 32M
upload_max_filesize = 16M
extension=oci8.so
Lets start the service
chkconfig httpd on service httpd start
We also need to allow the zabbix setup page to save the configuration.
chmod 777 /var/www/html/conf
Open your web browser to your server. All prerequisites should pass.
When configuring the database connection, make sure that you use the same database name etc as you did in your zabbix_server.conf
Lets clean up the conf directory again
chmod 755 /var/www/html/conf