Monitoring your RMAN backup scripts

There is an easy way to monitor your RMAN backup scripts in a unix environment. I've seen quite a few DBA's log the rman output to a file and then grep it for errors. Ex.

rman target / CMDFILE /home/oracle/scripts/rman.sql LOG $logfile
errors=`cat $logfile|grep -i error|wc -l`
if test $errors -gt 0
then
   mailx -s "BACKUP FAILED" email1@myserver.com, email2@myserver.com <<\! 
`cat $logfile`
!
fi

Another method would be to examine the return code from the rman client. Rman returns a value of 0 to the shell if the backup was successful. Otherwise it returns a nonzero value and from what I have seen this is always 1. (Have you seen any other values?)

So another way of writing the above script would be

rman target /  CMDFILE /home/oracle/scripts/rman.sql LOG $logfile
status=$?

if [ $status -gt 0 ] ; then
 mailx -s "BACKUP FAILED: TESTDB" email1@myserver.com <<\!
 `cat $logfile`
\! 
else
 mailx -s "SuccessfulBackup: TESTDB" email1@myserver.com <<\!
`cat $logfile`
\!
fi 

NOTE: Ignore the backlashes before the exclamation points above. I'm not sure how to format it properly within blogger. I'll see if I can fix it later.

As you can see above, after rman executes I set a status variable. $? is automatically set to the return code from the rman client. After that I check the value and there was an error I send an email saying the backup failed and put the contents of the log file into the body of the message. If the backup was successful, I still send a copy of the logfile.

The reason I do this is because each day I will expect to see either a successful or failed email. I've had issues in the past with cron not executing scheduled jobs (for numerous reasons). So if I don't receive an email I'll verify the backup manually.