ASH is an integral part of the Oracle Database self-management framework and is useful for diagnosing performance problems in Oracle RAC environments. ASH report statistics provide details about Oracle Database session activity. Oracle Database records information about active sessions for all active Oracle RAC instances and stores this data in the System Global Area (SGA). Any session that is connected to the database and using CPU is considered an active session. The exception to this is sessions that are waiting for an event that belongs to the idle wait class.
ASH reports present a manageable set of data by capturing only information about active sessions. The amount of the data is directly related to the work being performed, rather than the number of sessions allowed on the system.
ASH statistics that are gathered over a specified duration can be put into ASH reports. Each ASH report is divided into multiple sections to help you identify short-lived performance problems that do not appear in the ADDM analysis. Two ASH report sections that are specific to Oracle RAC are Top Cluster Events and Top Remote Instance as described in the next two sections.