Alertlog Errors Help
The Oracle alert.log facility is similar to that of the unix syslog facility. It is used to report various system messages like startup and shutdown, as well as checkpoints, redo-log switches, and most importantly ORA-xxxx errors.

Monitoring ORA-xxxx errors is an important part of the DBA's responsibility, and Karma aims to ease that burden by watching the alert.log for you.

Karma monitors databases remotely, and as such cannot directly access an OS level file such as the alert.log. The solution (if you're interested in monitoring the alert.log of remote databases) is the run an additional script which comes with Karma on any machine whose alert.log you wish to monitor. Essentially it watches the file for changes, and writes any ORA-xxxx errors to a table. Karma then just watches this table for new entries. Checkout the karmagentd for more information on configuring that end of things.

Beyond that, configure alertlog monitoring like you would any other facility in Karma. Here's an example:

alertlog:X:Y:Z

Where X is the number of minutes between checks of the alert.log monitoring table. Y is the number of minutes within which to consider the error and WARNING level situation. Z is the number of minutes within which to consider the error a WARNING level situation. Here's a recommended configuration:

alertlog:15:86400:60

This tells karma to monitor every 15 minutes, consider any ORA-xxxx errors within a day to be a WARNING situation, and any ORA-xxxx errors in the last hour to be an ALERT situation.