ORA-01801: date format is too long for internal buffer

Target type=Agent 
Host=UNIX 
Occurred At=Feb 29, 2008 6:19:17 AM EST 
Message=25 successive severity upload requests have failed. Last 
severity upload error is ORA-01801: date format is too long for internal buffer 
Metric=Consecutive severity upload failure count 
Metric value=25 
Severity=Critical 
Acknowledged=No 
Notification Rule Name=Misconfigured agents 
Notification Rule Owner=SYSMAN 

This is an out of the blue error that any environment would throw out as
part of the daily monitoring using OEM GC. This usually crops up from the
target host where the OEM agent takes care of the job of monitoring the
host and its instances and other processes. Any DBA out of his/her
instinctive efforts would try to bounce the agent thinking the agent has
gone crazy after having run for so many days or may be so many months.
But with an ./emctl upload from the AGENT_HOME/bin shows up
the same error again.

Some folks even try to bounce the OEM console giving it a vain attempt to
resolve the issue but to no avail. However the actual trick is to bounce
the OEM repository database along with the OEM console, to work around the
situation. The order of bounce to be followed is shown below.

Shutdown Order
--------------

OEM GC --> OEM Repository DB

OMS_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl stopall

ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop LISTENER

ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut


Startup Order
-------------

OEM Repository DB --> OEM GC

ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart

ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start LISTENER

OMS_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl startall