The message "ASM Health Checker found 1 new failures" is a critical alert typically logged in the Oracle ASM alert log when the Automatic Storage Management (ASM) instance detects an issue that threatens the integrity or availability of a disk group. Typical Causes
This specific error often appears immediately after storage-related operations or critical failures, such as:
Disk Group Dismounts: Often preceded by ORA-15130, indicating a disk group was forced to dismount due to lost connectivity.
Disk Failures: A physical disk or LUN becomes inaccessible, or a write error occurs that ASM cannot recover from through mirroring.
Metadata Corruption: Inconsistencies found during a rebalance or an manual ALTER DISKGROUP CHECK operation.
ACFS Issues: Adding disks to or resizing an ASM Cluster File System (ACFS) can sometimes trigger failures if voting files cannot be refreshed or membership refresh fails. Recommended Diagnostic Steps asm health checker found 1 new failures updated
Check the ASM Alert Log: Use the ADRCI Command-Line Utility to view the full error stack surrounding the "1 new failures" message.
Command: adrci> show alert -p "message_text like '%error%'".
Verify Disk Group Status: Log into the ASM instance as SYSASM and check the state of your disk groups: SQL> SELECT name, state FROM v$asm_diskgroup;
Run Internal Consistency Checks: If the disk group is still mounted, manually trigger a metadata check: SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP
Review Cluster State: For RAC environments, use crsctl to check if resources are in an INTERMEDIATE or OFFLINE state: $ crsctl stat res -t Summary Table: Failure Indicators Potential Meaning ORA-15130 Disk group is being dismounted (often due to I/O failure). ORA-15040 Disk group is incomplete/missing member disks. GMON dumping The message "ASM Health Checker found 1 new
ASM background process is capturing diagnostic data after a failure. INTERMEDIATE state
The disk group is partially functional but has reached a warning threshold. KB88485 - My Oracle Support
If a disk was accidentally taken offline or lost connectivity but is now accessible:
ALTER DISKGROUP data ONLINE DISK data_0003;
Wait for the recovery to complete (monitor via v$asm_operation). Once done, the health checker will automatically clear the failure and log a corresponding "failure cleared" message.
The ASM Health Checker is an internal diagnostic tool embedded within Oracle ASM (introduced in Oracle 11g Release 2 and enhanced in 12c, 18c, 19c, and 21c). Its primary function is to periodically validate the integrity, accessibility, and configuration of ASM disk groups and their underlying disks. Immediate Steps to Diagnose Scenario 1: Offline Disk
Unlike manual health checks (such as ALTER DISKGROUP ... CHECK), the ASM Health Checker runs automatically in the background. It monitors critical metrics including:
When the checker detects a new anomaly that was not present in its previous scan, it increments a failure count and writes the message: "ASM Health Checker found [X] new failures updated" to the ASM alert log.
If the disk is still NORMAL but shows path errors:
multipath -r to reconfigure.The most common cause. If an ASM disk becomes inaccessible due to:
Then the health checker will flag this as a new failure.
ls -la /dev/oracleasm/disks/
# or
ls -la /dev/mapper/
System administrators are urged to investigate immediate storage integrity issues following an automated alert indicating that the ASM Health Checker has detected a new failure within the storage subsystem.