How Oracle Inventory is Gathered

This lesson explains how Asset Vision gathers Oracle Server Inventory information. Asset Vision has the capability to discover and inventory Oracle database installations. This document describes how the data is collected, the data itself and the access rights required.

Overview

The Asset Vision Oracle solution consist of four probes:

  • Oracle NMAP Probe Detects the Oracle TNS Listener process running on specified ports(s)
  • WMI Oracle SID Probe Collects information on Oracle SIDs form Windows machines
  • SSH Oracle SID Probe Collects information on Oracle SIDs form Linux/Unix machines
  • Oracle JDBC Probe Collects inventory data from the Oracle database

The Oracle probes can be run as a complete “discover and inventory” solution or be run separately to perform Oracle discovery and Oracle inventory as different tasks.

Oracle Discovery

The Oracle NMAP Probe can be set to discover Oracle across a range of IP numbers or against specific IP numbers. The NMAP probe is run with the following NMAP switches:

-PE -PS1521,1526 -sV -p 1521,1526 -oX –

The probe uses NMAP to test the listed ports and interpret the response to identify the Oracle TNS Listener process running.

Oracle Inventory

In order to inventory an Oracle database the Oracle SID needs to be supplied. This can be optionally discovered by Asset Vision, or supplied by the Administrator.

If SID discovery is required, then prior to running the Oracle Probe, AV will run either the WMI Oracle SID Probe or the SSH Oracle SID Probe, depending upon the target system OS. These two probes discover the Oracle SID for the database.

Once the SID is discovered or supplied, the Oracle Probe can be run to collect Oracle inventory data. This probe uses JDBC to connect to the target Oracle database to collect the required data.

Alternative Oracle Inventory

For some organizations, running the Oracle Discovery and SID discovery probes is either not possible or not desirable (Oracle NMAP Probe, WMI Oracle SID

Probe and SSH Oracle SID Probe). In these cases if the Oracle SIDs are known then they can be supplied with the Oracle credentials and can be used directly with the Oracle Inventory probe.

Access Credentials and Rights

Oracle NMAP Discovery Probe

This requires no access credentials as the process does not require access to a computer.

SSH/WMI Oracle SID Probe

An account must be provided whereby the Oracle tool “lsnrctl status” can be run from the command line.

Oracle JDBC Probe

The Oracle JDBC probe works by connecting to the designated Oracle database and executing SQL scripts. These scripts perform identical functions to the Oracle LMS database audit scripts.

The scripts capture data from various system tables into global temporary tables, which when complete is sent to the AV server in XML form. The temporary tables are cleaned and removed on completion.

Below is the current set of rights required by a user to perform the inventory.

  • The user must be able to connect to the database.
  • The user must have access to the temporary tablespace and be able to create temporary tables.
  • The user must be granted read access to dictionary tables (to get Oracle version, Edition, etc.).
  • The user must be granted read access to management tables to obtain all installed DB options and their states (in use, etc.).