This means that during the reporting interval, the Oracle instance consumed 94% of the available CPU! This also means that only 6% CPU power remains for all other processes. Obviously, this server is experiencing a severe CPU bottleneck.

In the preceding formula, I purposely included the conversion factors. Notice that all the time units cancel out, leaving us with a raw numeric without any reference to time. I could have carried the CPU core's metric to the final value of 94%, since 94% of the CPU core capacity was utilized, but since we normally don't represent utilization like this, it could cause some confusion.

It is important to understand this calculation is not the operating system CPU utilization, which can be gathered using an operating system command such as vmstat. What we calculated with this utilization formula is Oracle's CPU consumption related to the database server CPU capacity. This is commonly called the Oracle CPU utilization.