AHF Insights now includes a new patching section showing Database and GI patches

Managing patches can be difficult. It requires the ability to:

• Keep track of which individual patches are applied, to which hosts, and when.
• Spot where you’ve got gaps in patches.
• Understand which bugs the various patches fix.

AHF Insights now makes this a whole lot easier with the new Patching Information section. The Patching Information section shows Database and GI patches per host and Oracle Home, providing easy understanding of which patches are applied and where. There’s also a new patch timeline, which visualizes patch information showing when patches were applied. Gaps or inconsistencies in patching are highlighted across nodes for the same home. Bugs and relevant patch information can be quickly searched and viewed via interactive reports.

AHF Insights is now mobile responsive and optimized for ease of reading.

People rely on AHF Insights to get a top-down system view, see when problems occur, understand the causes, and how to fix them. Now, AHF Insights can be viewed on a mobile phone. Navigate system topology, drill into problems, and get recommendations from anywhere when on the go. To view graphs just tilt to landscape to get full screen metric immersion.

In addition, AHF Insights has several improvements to make it easier to use and faster to find important information. Various AHF Insights sections have now been optimized to provide default viewing options, which make it even easier and faster to explore data.

• The Cluster Section now shows Database homes ordered by Database Version and Database Homes are expanded by default.
• The Database Section shows CDB names sorted alphabetically by default.
• The Operating System Issues Section has rearranged and added new data labels and the IO and Network details can now be configured.

On Exadata Dom0, AHF installations can be converted from standalone (extract) to typical, and /EXAVMIMAGES is now used for the default data directory.

AHF provides multiple installation methods:

• Standalone: Extracts only the AHF bits.
• Typical: Performs full install including configuring scheduling for important features like compliance checking.

Previously, to change an AHF installation from standalone to typical required an uninstall followed by a fresh install. Now, any upgrades on Exadata Dom0 of a Standalone installation will prompt to convert to Typical and any installation will prompt to start the scheduler if it’s not already running. Existing AHF installations can be converted from Standalone to Typical during scripted upgrades by using the -upgradetotypical option.

On Exadata Dom0 the default installation location of /opt can get quickly filled by collections.

Now, fresh AHF installations on Exadata Dom0 use /EXAVMIMAGES as the default data directory. Additionally, auto upgrades as either root or a user within the Platinum role will automatically move the data directory to be under /EXAVMIMAGES.

For more information, see Convert AHF Standalone (default) Installation to Typical Installation.

Diagnostic collections can now be redacted faster by increasing the CPU allocation to ACR.

AHF ships with ACR (Adaptive Classification and Redaction) for the purposes of sanitizing sensitive data. Redaction involves scanning the full contents of every file within a collection, so is very CPU intensive. For this reason, there are certain limits put in place within AHF to ensure excessive CPU is not used.

All AHF processes run under a CGroups setting, which caps the maximum CPU usage at the lower of either 4 CPUs or 75% of available CPUs. Additionally, there is a specific cap on ACR to only use a maximum of 20% of available CPU.

In some environments, however, customers have large CPU resources and want to use more CPU so redaction can be completed quickly. This can now be accomplished with this two-phase process:

ahfctl setresourcelimit -resource cpu -value <cpu_count> -force

For more information about setting resource limit, see ahfctl setresourcelimit.

tfactl diagcollect <option> <-sanitize | -mask> -acrprocesscount <cpu_count>

For example, tfactl diagcollect -last 5m -acrprocesscount 3 -sanitize

For more information on redaction of AHF collections, see Sanitizing Sensitive Information in Oracle Trace File Analyzer Collections and tfactl diagcollect.

Release 23.7 includes the following new Oracle Orachk and Oracle Exachk best practice checks.