Introducing SessionUtilization: A Smarter Way to Monitor Autonomous Databases

Release Date: May 28, 2025

Oracle has added a powerful new monitoring tool to Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata and Exadata Cloud@Customer: the SessionUtilization metric. This game-changing feature helps DBAs gain better visibility into session activity—ensuring performance, capacity planning, and resource optimization—all in one simple percentage.

What Is SessionUtilization?

SessionUtilization is a backend database metric that reports the maximum percentage of active sessions across all consumer groups at any point in time. In essence, it answers the question:

“How fully is your database session capacity being used at peak times?”

By tracking this metric, you can:

• Proactively identify session bottlenecks

• Prevent resource throttling or session queuing

• Support smarter workload capacity planning

Real-World Scenarios

1. Peak Traffic Monitoring at a Retailer

Situation: A retailer’s database handles hundreds of concurrent sessions during holiday flash sales.

Outcome: DBAs watch SessionUtilization spike to 85%, then scale up CPU or enqueue gating before hitting critical 100% saturation—ensuring a smooth shopping experience.

2. Optimizing Dev/Test Environments

Situation: During nightly test runs, session usage surges unexpectedly.
Outcome: Instead of provisioning for rare peaks, teams use SessionUtilization to show peaks only hit 60%, allowing them to save costs by right-sizing the database.

3. Multi-Consumer Workload Balancing

Situation: Reporting and ETL jobs run alongside OLTP workloads within the same database.
Outcome: DBAs segment consumer groups and monitor each group’s session utilization—smoothing peak loads by scheduling ETL when utilization is low.

How to Use It

SessionUtilization is exposed via OCI’s Metrics API and can be consumed by tools like OCI Monitoring, Grafana, or Prometheus. Here’s a sample OCI CLI fetch:

oci monitoring metric list-data-points \
  --namespace oci_autonomous_database \
  --query-text "SessionUtilization[1m].max()" \
  --resource-id <your-ADB-resource-OCID>

You can integrate this into alerting rules—e.g., trigger warnings when session utilization exceeds 75%, and critical alerts at 90%+.

Recommended Dashboard Widget

Build a dashboard widget showing:

• Live session utilization over the past hour (1-minute granularity)

• A max utilization gauge with color-coded zones (green: 0–70%, amber: 70–90%, red: 90–100%)

• Consumer group-specific utilization breakdowns

This setup gives you both real-time insight and strategic foresight.

Best Practices & Takeaway

• Set proactive alerts at 70% utilization to avoid performance slowdown.

• Correlate with CPU usage and SQL throughput to assess full-stack impact.

• Use historical data to guide capacity planning and avoid over-provisioning.

• Tune consumer groups by redistributing workloads based on utilization patterns.

Final Thoughts

With SessionUtilization, Oracle empowers DBAs and engineers with deeper session-level insight—making it easier than ever to monitor performance peaks, enforce quality-of-service, and scope infrastructure investments wisely.