Use the Physical Reads Rate alert in Mini DBA to monitor Oracle instances and make this condition visible before it becomes a wider database incident.
Mini DBA describes this alert as: Physical reads per second from disk High rates indicate poor buffer cache hit ratio or large table scans Consider increasing SGA or tuning queries The default evaluation frequency is Minute, so the alert is intended to be close enough to operational reality for live triage. Because duration is used, Mini DBA can avoid treating a single short spike as a full incident when the condition clears quickly.
This alert helps reveal query and workload pressure. It points you toward expensive statements, plan changes, inefficient access patterns, or bursts of work that need investigation before they affect service levels.
Enable it on any monitored Oracle instance where this condition would require an administrator to investigate or communicate with the application team. Tune noisy development systems after you have a short baseline.
Threshold meaning: Reads/sec. Major threshold: 10000 reads/sec. Minor threshold: 5000 reads/sec. Comparison direction: "over". Duration is used, so prefer requiring the condition to persist before paging people for transient spikes. Use higher thresholds on batch-heavy, development, or intentionally bursty systems where brief pressure is expected. Use lower thresholds on latency-sensitive production systems, small instances with little headroom, and services with strict recovery or availability commitments.
Use the query, wait, and performance views to find the statement or subsystem behind the pressure. Compare against the recent baseline, update statistics, tune indexes, adjust application batching, and move maintenance work away from peak periods where possible.
If the alert creates repeated noise, review whether it is enabled on the correct instances, whether maintenance windows are configured, and whether the minor and major routes match the real business impact. Keep enough history to prove the new setting before changing it broadly.