Oracle11g: Where’s My Alert Log?

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.

5 Responses to “Oracle11g: Where’s My Alert Log?”


  1. 1 Alex Fatkulin July 13, 2007 at 1:12 am

    I see they call this a new feature… Automatic Diagnostic Repository

  2. 2 Don Seiler July 15, 2007 at 12:54 am

    Then what’s in the “alert” directory?

  3. 3 Pavel Ruzicka July 16, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    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.

  4. 4 Syed Jaffar Hussain August 18, 2007 at 1:38 pm

    Kevin,

    Somtime back, I have blogged about the same at my blog.

    http://jaffardba.blogspot.com/search/label/11g

    Jaffar

  5. 5 oraclebrains December 18, 2007 at 5:30 pm

    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