What is Oracle Support Agent and its features
The Support Agent is a data collector agent designed to provide continuous tracking of key Oracle and system statistics of the machine it is running on. The support agent provides precise information to Oracle Support analysts so they can understand the problem and deal with it quickly and effectively. One support agent is required per machine running Oracle. Data collected by the support agent is sent via secured HTTP back to Oracle Support where we can maintain an updated view of your Oracle instance.
Oracle Support Agent is a utility implemented with the My Configurations and Projects online support services framework. Support Agent automatically collects pertinent system and application information about Oracle customer systems.
The Oracle Support Agent is an automatic diagnostics data collection utility. Once every 24 hours, Oracle Support Agent initiates data collection. The collection process is all automated, and requires no manual intervention. During data collection, Oracle Support Agent requires approximately 2% of CPU resources, a minimal amount. You can also issue a manual command to Oracle Support Agent to perform a full collection, and to send results to Oracle.
Benefits of Oracle Support Agent:
* Greatly reduce service request resolution time
* View your latest platform and Oracle configuration online from MetaLink.
* Track which Oracle software components are out of date
* Easy to deploy, install, and use
Features of Oracle Support Agent:
* Lightweight agent that consumes little CPU resources.
* Automatic discovery of Oracle and platform profiles at first start-up.
* Collects data from Host, Oracle 8i/9i database, Oracle iAS, and Oracle Applications 11i.
* Collects data at pre-defined intervals or by event threshold.
* Uses HTTPS protocol to communicate securely with Oracle.
* Enable Oracle Support to provide standard and automatic protocols for discovering and resolving problems, sometimes before customers are even aware that they exist.
* Enable Oracle Support to identify common patterns of system and software interactions in customer environments, including milestones, configurations, and critical settings of the customer’s hardware platforms, operating systems, business applications, application or web servers, and databases.
* Enhance Oracle Support engineers’ understanding of customer environments.
* Using metrics from customer systems, Oracle support engineers can resolve issues faster.
* Support Agent only collects configuration information; it does not collect business transactions, passwords, or control sensitive information.
* Configuration information is securely collected by encrypted internal upload or Oracle OCCN (VPN).
* The Configuration Repository is located in the Oracle Intranet and protected by several firewalls.
* All uploads go through a series of validation checks before the configuration is viewable by Meta Link.
*No other customers are able to access your configuration data.
Installation of Oracle Support Agent:
Oracle Support Agent can be installed on any host computer containing Oracle software. With scheduled collection, Oracle Support Agent uploads system data automatically to the Customer Configuration Repository database. Oracle Support Agent uploads data it has gathered once every 24 hours over an HTTPS or OCCN (Oracle Continuous Connection Network) VPN to Oracle Support Services.
One of the key concerns for those using Oracle Support agent might be the security of data transmitted to Oracle and residing on their web site.
Oracle Support Agent Works with Automatic Collection, Oracle Support Agent collects data once a day for transmission to Oracle Support. The collection time is defined by the date that Oracle Support Agent is installed and started.