Just a short blog entry about Oracle 11g. One of the first things that caught me by surprise with 11g, when I first started in the beta program, was that the default location for the alert log has moved. It is still placed under the traditional OFA structure, but not /u01/app/oracle/admin. There is a new directory called diag that resides in /u01/app/oracle as seen on one of my systems:
$ pwd
/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/bench/bench1
$ ls -l
total 144
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 9 21:32 alert
drwxr-xr-x 3 oracle dba 4096 Jul 8 11:11 cdump
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 9 04:02 hm
drwxr-xr-x 9 oracle dba 4096 Jul 8 11:11 incident
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 9 04:02 incpkg
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jun 29 22:00 ir
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 10 08:59 lck
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 10 08:59 metadata
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 8 11:11 stage
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 4096 Jul 8 11:11 sweep
drwxr-xr-x 3 oracle dba 57344 Jul 10 09:02 trace
$ cd trace
$ pwd
/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/bench/bench1/trace
$ ls -l alert*
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 1098745 Jul 10 09:00 alert_bench1.log
In this case, my database is called bench and the first instance is bench1. To quickly locate alert logs associated with many different ORACLE_HOMEs simple execute the adrci command and then execute “show alert”
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
I see they call this a new feature… Automatic Diagnostic Repository
Then what’s in the “alert” directory?
You can find all the details in “Note:438148.1 – Finding alert.log file in 11g”. Detailed explanation. Interesting to see this note published before the actual 11g release date.
Kevin,
Somtime back, I have blogged about the same at my blog.
http://jaffardba.blogspot.com/search/label/11g
Jaffar
Few days back I had problem in finding trace file.
After some research I now think best way to find the path is to query the v$diag_info view.
Rajs
Guys.
Do you have any idea if there is a way to change that location (way too many directories) to a more simple one like background_dump_dest?
Thanks,
Alex.
Nice information. Is there anyway to disable xml alert.log using any parameter. Sometimes .xml is creating lots of problem to monitoring alert.log errors.
Good question. I don’t know…would have to troll the doc and perhaps the web for that one 🙂