Oracle introduces Solaris ACT Service

Oracle has launched the ACT Service tool that allows administrators to faster analyze a memory dump after a “system panic” of the Solaris OS. This eliminates the need to send an extremely large file to be analyzed via normal broadband connections, speeding up the analysis process.

Among companies, the Solaris operating system is still popular, despite fewer updates being released since 2018. However, the operating system does use a lot of memory, up to 8 TB for the proprietary Oracle Sparc processors and up to 3 TB for x86-based processors.

In the event of a crash or “system panic” of a Solairs environment, the operating system automatically takes a snapshot of the memory, compresses this snapshot and sends it to Oracle for analysis. At the tech giant, all data sent in the crash dump is scanned for malicious traffic before diagnosis takes place.

Sending these large amounts of data to Oracle does take a lot of time given the size of the data. Even the fastest Internet connection in the world takes 18 hours over a 2 TB dump, according to Oracle. This slows down the entire analytics process, with all its consequences.

Operation of the ACT Service

ACT Service should offer a solution. Instead of administrators performing analysis manually, by extracting files, running the debugger and executing a debugger command for analysis, this service does this entirely automatically.

The service ensures that, instead of uploading the crash dump, it is stored locally. However, sufficient storage space must be available for this. Completely automatically, an initial analysis report is then generated, which administrators can use to work on determining the cause of the Solaris crash.

In addition, Oracle’s ACT Service automatically restores to a “pre-analysis state” by cleaning up the temporary unzipped files.