In Oracle 11g,  ADRCI tool is the recommended way to view or monitor the alert log. 

To successfully use ADRCI to view the alert log, we need to make sure the ADRCI home are set correctly.We can determine the ADRCI homepath by using the show home or show homepath commands


adrci> show homes

adrci> show homepth

adrci> set homepath

By default, ADRCI displays the alert log in your default editor. You can use the SET EDITOR command to change your default editor. If no editor is set, ADRCI uses the editor specified by the operating system environment variable $EDITOR

adrci> set editor vi

To display all contents of the alert log
adrci> show alert

To display the last 10 entries of the alert log
adrci> show alert -tail

To display the last 30 entries of the alert log
adrci> show alert -tail 30

To display the last 10 entries and  then waits for more messages to arrive in the alert log
SHOW ALERT -TAIL -F

This displays only alert log messages that contain the string 'ORA-600'
SHOW ALERT -P "MESSAGE_TEXT LIKE '%ORA-600%'"

In Oracle 11gR1, there is bug(Bug 7648929) in "show alert" and you may receive "DIA-48216: Field Len Exceeds Max Field Length [5] [0] [20] [20]" due to the corruption of xml format alert log. To avoid this error, you can upgrade the database to 11gR2 or use "show alert -tail" instead.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • Spurl
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati