If you’ve ever had to open a service request with Oracle, you’ve probably been asked to run a Service Request Diagnostic Collection (SRDC) using Oracle’s Trace File Analyzer (TFA) utility. TFA is now part of a bundle of very useful utilities provided under the blanket name Oracle AHF, or Oracle Autonomous Health Framework.

AHF provides some very nifty Insights reports that create output in a nice interactive HTML format. They make it extremely easy to see problems with DB, RAC, or Grid Infrastructure installations. Unfortunately, if you’re on IBM AIX, these reports are not available.

On our AIX server, let’s try to create an insights report:

$ ahf analysis create --type insights
AHF-01001: parser error: argument action: invalid choice: 'create' (choose from 'explore')
Cause:     'ahf' was invoked with incorrect parameters.
Action:    Review accompanying error information and correct and reissue the command.

Running ahf analysis with the -help flag doesn’t even show create as a valid action:

$ ahf analysis -help 
usage: ahf analysis action [options]

action:
  {explore}
    explore   Create an exploration

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Check the same output from a lab machine running Linux, where Insights reports are working:

$ ahf analysis -help
usage: ahf analysis action [options]

action:
  {create,explore}
    create          Create an analysis
    explore         Create an exploration

options:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit

Okay, that doesn’t look like there’s a problem with the ahf command. It is different on AIX, but just to be sure, let’s open an SR. I did that and asked for clarification. The support engineer advised that AHF Insights aren’t supported on AIX.

Bummer. Even more of a bummer was that I spent quite some time debugging this, re-validating the AHF installations, checking versions, and re-affirming certifications to make sure that I hadn’t made a mistake. It wasn’t until I ran ahf analysis -help that I got a clue that maybe it had something to do with the platform difference. Of course, it would take Oracle Support to confirm this, as there was no explicit de-support statement on anything from MOS or the AHF documentation. It sure would be nice to see this added…

Hope this saves you some time,
Dustin