8.3 Using the Cluster Resource Activity Log to Monitor Cluster Resource Failures
The cluster resource activity log provides precise and specific information about a resource failure, separate from diagnostic logs.
If an Oracle Clusterware-managed resource fails, then Oracle Clusterware logs messages about the failure in the cluster resource activity log located in the Grid Infrastructure Management Repository. Failures can occur as a result of a problem with a resource, a hosting node, or the network. The cluster resource activity log provides a unified view of the cause of resource failure.
Writes to the cluster resource activity log are tagged with an activity ID and any related data gets the same parent activity ID, and is nested under the parent data. For example, if Oracle Clusterware is running and you run the crsctl stop clusterware -all command, then all activities get activity IDs, and related activities are tagged with the same parent activity ID. On each node, the command creates sub-IDs under the parent IDs, and tags each of the respective activities with their corresponding activity ID. Further, each resource on the individual nodes creates sub-IDs based on the parent ID, creating a hierarchy of activity IDs. The hierarchy of activity IDs enables you to analyze the data to find specific activities.
For example, you may have many resources with complicated dependencies among each other, and with a database service. On Friday, you see that all of the resources are running on one node but when you return on Monday, every resource is on a different node, and you want to know why. Using the crsctl query calog command, you can query the cluster resource activity log for all activities involving those resources and the database service. The output provides a complete flow and you can query each sub-ID within the parent service failover ID, and see, specifically, what happened and why.
You can query any number of fields in the cluster resource activity log using filters. For example, you can query all the activities written by specific operating system users such as root. The output produced by the crsctl query calog command can be displayed in either a tabular format or in XML format.
The cluster resource activity log is an adjunct to current Oracle Clusterware logging and alert log messages.
Note:
Oracle Clusterware does not write messages that contain security-related information, such as log-in credentials, to the cluster activity log.
Use the following commands to manage and view the contents of the cluster resource activity log: