Dear Tom.
So we are having to review here our strategies to monitor our remote physical standby database due audit requirements.

The first strategy that I think, is to create a simple user "dgmon", allowing access only to V_$MANAGED_STANDBY, V_$ARCHIVE_GAP, V_$INSTANCE, V_$DATABASE and V_$ARCHIVED_LOG. The access attempts made on our primary database has worked properly, however, we have faced the ORA-01033 error on standby database (Oracle Initialization startup or shutdown in progress).

Reading some forums here, I have found that access in a MOUNT database is only possible in SYSDBA or SYSOPER mode. We cannot use SYSDBA to run our automated monitoring scripts (as told by our auditors), but SYSOPER, according to them, can be used. However, I cannot access the V$ tables using SYSOPER, even granting access for them explicitly. I used the following queries:

GRANT SELECT ON V_$ARCHIVED_LOG TO DGMON;
GRANT SELECT ON V_$DATABASE TO DGMON;
GRANT SELECT ON V_$INSTANCE TO DGMON;
GRANT SELECT ON V_$ARCHIVE_GAP TO DGMON;
GRANT SELECT ON V_$MANAGED_STANDBY TO DGMON;

I wonder that is a known issue, because I also have read in other forums that Oracle has delivered in version 12c, a new role called SYSDG. I took a look into this role and seems that it is exactly what we need, but since Oracle has extended the free extended support until 2017, my organization has decided to postpone the upgrade project to 12c for next year.

Can you kindly advise how we solve our audit problem using 11g resources?
Thanks a lot.