A few years ago there was this great tool for monitoring Oracle databases written by Sean Hull named Karma.  Karma was best described as "Big Brother for Oracle".  After reaching the 1.0 release the updates quit happening. 

Many people continued to run the 1.0 version and were quite happy with it.  Problems began to occur with newer versions of Perl giving errors, warnings and the like.  Also the links page started having more and more dead links on it. 

Some people continued to update their local versions of Karma to fix these issues.  After a while keeping track of all changes became a chore.

Given that Vipaka was born to move Karma forward.

There exist plugins for Big Brother and Nagios which provide some of the functionality of Karma, but the karma was a great one stop shop for getting database information.

Vipaka has several e-mail lists at Sourceforge:

Vipaka Announce List: vipaka-announce@lists.sourceforge.net (low volume)
Vipaka Developers List: vipaka-developers@lists.sourcceforge.net
Vipaka Users List: vipaka-users@lists.sourceforge.net

We are going to be refactoring/updating a lot of the code over the next couple of releases.  Also most of the help/support docs are heavily based on Sean's work.  We'll be continuning to revise update them in the future.

Please send email and comments to: grothe@users.sourceforge.net