FourthElephant's Insider for Oracle tries to point to the actual and potential problems before the real users start to. As databases and middleware become more and more complex, organizations face a hard choice of either completely relying on their users' feedback to hunt their performance problems or implementing a universal solution in an attempt to protect from all types of failures and slowdowns. While reacting to the user feedback has the benefit of directly revealing the problem, users may not always express their concern before they begin to vote with their money. A universal solution can become plain too expensive to handle both in terms of price and the expertise required to support.

    A usual database or a middleware server reports hundreds of performance related characteristics while more complex solutions such as Oracle may have well over a thousand. These numbers have to be multiplied by the number of servers since an administrator usually handles multiple servers. It is not unheard of to have 50 or more databases per DBA. These new utilities should help minimize that time by filtering out only the statistics that are relevant at the moment and presenting them in an intuitive and easily digestible form. The approach taken by the FourthElephant's team is to take over the statistic gathering and analysis and display the results on a single screen. More often than not this is all that is required. The solution does have a number of other views to drill down to a specific problem or take a preventive action.  How would an administrator possibly face with this load of data let alone in real time? Quite often SLAs restrict service offers to just minutes of downtime so these minutes become precious.

    Insider for Oracle provides a proactive approach to monitoring and tuning by offloading most of the statistic collecting and interpretation burden to its advanced rules and alerts engine. Unlike many other enterprise monitoring utilities it installs and is ready to use within seconds. A single installation can easily control hundreds of databases without requiring enterprise-class hardware. Throughout its user interface it uses a principle that a human eye reacts to motion better than to any other type of visual communication, showing different performance information such as session activity with animation-style moving controls. Its appearance may create an impression that the product targets beginner to mid-level administrator but this impression is deceptive. Capable of saving and analyzing performance statistics for a month's worth of history it offers a complete set of utilities even to an expert and those who tried to set up a collection of monitoring scripts will appreciate its comprehensive alert engine covering around a hundred performance and availability related conditions.

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