Oracle DBAs should now be familiar with the product management blog published last April: Take Action Today: Protect Your Oracle Database Against AI-Enabled Cybersecurity Threats. One of the recommendations in the blog is to ensure your database client libraries are updated as well. Keeping track of your clients locations and versions may be a challenge, as these may be part of applications or client tools running on various remote hosts or developers individual laptops.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 24ai, as of Release Update 11, provides a new out-of-the-box dashboard that can solve this problem, Oracle Database Client Drivers dashboard. You can use this dashboard to view client session driver types and versions across monitored database targets. It helps you identify the client drivers and versions used across your database fleet, so you know which are below the database patch level and need to be patched.
Enabling the Metric
The dashboard is not populated by default (navigate to “Enterprise” -> “Dashboards” -> “Oracle Database Client Drivers”). To populate it, you need to enable collection of the new metric “DB Client Version Monitoring” on your database targets. This metric is found under “Metric and Collection Settings” of a database target or monitoring template, on the “Other Collected Items” tab. For Multi-Tenant databases, the metric can be set on the container database and the PDB:
- If enabling on a monitoring template, click on the “Other Collected Items”.
- If on a database target, navigate to target menu, “Monitoring”->”Metrics and Collections Settings” -> “Other Collected Items” tab.
- Locate the metric “DB Client Version Monitoring“. The collection schedule should show “Disabled”. Enable collection by setting an interval. The suggested interval is 6 hours, which should be adequate. You can temporarily set the collection schedule to every 5 or 10 minutes for testing.
Utilizing the Dashboard
Populated dashboard with the metric enabled on 2 databases. The dashboard will show data for clients that connected to the database during the time interval you set on the top right corner:
Database Client Driver Versions Details:
Client Hosts Details. The last entry is for a laptop running SQL Developer. With this information, the DBA can alert the developer to update the client drivers on their local workstation:
