Database monitoring tools help to track the uptime and performance of databases using performance metrics. Ensuring high availability, database monitoring tools give IT teams a 360-degree view across multi-vendor databases, on-premises, or in the cloud.
What is database monitoring?
A database is a collection of information that is organized and stored as aggregated files so that it can be easily accessed and managed. Databases are crucial for most operations. Database monitoring is a collective approach that monitors database attributes that are critical to your business operations. It aims to minimize unavailability and other operational issues.
Why monitor databases?
Monitoring databases is important for eliminating poor database performance. Applications are numerous and complex in today's tech environments. Poor database performance can cause application slowness and other issues which will, in turn, affect customer experience. Issues like idle connection timeout, table space values, and reorganization of indices are common database performance issues that don't give any clear direct information to users or system administrators unless it is thoroughly monitored.
Benefits of database monitoring
Database monitoring can give you the following benefits:
- Quicker troubleshooting: Faster diagnosis of database issues helps provide more efficient troubleshooting and quicker resolution of application issues.
- Performance fine-tuning: Fixing errors help to optimize databases so they are utilized more effectively. Performance fine-tuning requires significant expertise to find out which of many SQL statements in a database needs tuning. Other insights for performance improvements also need to be obtained to optimize performance.
- Improve user experience: Availability, throughput, and performance decide the user experience. All these should be continually monitored to provide a positive user experience. A slow and unresponsive database slows down the application performance.
An ideal database monitoring tool
The following are a few pointers for implementing a database monitoring tool:
- Automatic data collection: The tool should be able to collect all performance indices automatically, without manual configuration, so that users obtain a complete view of their database.
- Drill down to the database operations: Users should be able to drill down to obtain detailed insights such as errors, replications, SQL compilations, and the longest transaction time of SQL instances.
- Generate timely alerts: Utilizing a monitoring tool that allows limits to be set for key performance metrics so users can receive alerts about threshold breaches is key. This enables the user to act promptly and avoid costly errors.
- Capacity planning: A deep understanding of the various infrastructure-related metrics, including page reads, page writes, memory and buffer manager details, and DevOps-related metrics like locks and latches, is required for optimal capacity planning.
- Improve database performance: It is essential to utilize a tool that can analyze the total number of SQL queries executed, and especially if the database performance is poor, even if there are indications of optimal resource consumption and 100 percent availability. The tool should also be able to analyze the time between a database query request and its response, and identify where the wait is happening to determine which methods produce queries that are executed slowly.
- Automate incident remediation: Reacting to every minor issue might be tiresome. An ideal monitoring tool must be able to automate incident remediation using scripts and other predefined methods.
Site24x7 as a database monitoring tool
Site24x7 is an all-in-one monitoring solution that can help you prevent real-time server and application performance issues. Site24x7 monitors SQL databases, MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, Oracle, and cloud databases hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Site24x7 also enables users to set thresholds for various metrics that are provided for monitoring these databases, and to ensure users are instantly notified of any database outages.
Here are some best practices for database performance optimization.