Database Monitoring Tools

Comprehensive database monitoring is an essential part of most businesses. Business operations are reliant upon database performance and reliability.

Over the past 20+ years, we have used several different monitoring tools. Some tools performed monitoring well but lacked other components necessary to assist with optimal performance, and many didn't offer adequate detailed reporting.

This blog will explain some of the many benefits of an Outsource DBA solution and how we determined Foglight monitoring tool to be Best-in-Class by introducing you to the key features. In our opinion, these are the essential requirements for a top-performing database monitoring tool.

"Foglight from Quest is the broadest and deepest monitoring and optimization solution for the hybrid enterprise."

Buy VS Build:

There are open-source products available and will do database monitoring or have plug-ins for database monitoring. As with any decision involving buying a product that already does what you want or choosing another solution that will require an investment to make it do what you want it to do, you must weigh the benefits. Where do you want to spend your time? Do you want to invest future time keeping the product up-to-date with new releases of database software?

Database-Centric:

Since we are focusing on the database, we want a specifically designed tool to show database metrics. Some tools may tell you basic information about the health of a database, is it up or is it down, but we needed a tool that we can use for more in-depth analysis at the database-level. Built into the tool, Foglight looks at transaction throughput, database waits, database backup status, database memory status, and even current session activity. It also allows a properly authenticated user to kill a session. Since Foglight stores metrics in a repository, you can also pull historical reports and utilize built-in metrics for such items as capacity planning.

Granularity:

Any good monitoring tool will allow for easy customization by device and easily direct notifications to the appropriate resource. Because not one size fits all, it is paramount to adjust thresholds and alarms to fit the need of the given environment and devices. For example, the monitoring needs for a production environment are different from that of dev, test, train, or QA. Although each of the lower regions is "production" to someone, thresholds and notifications usually are not as stringent as production.

Reliability:

Monitoring must be reliable. Because we are leveraging a professional organization with a development team and support team, we can rely on Quest to provide our clients' consistency.

Mobility:

DBAs and the support team can diagnose and respond to alarms when systems demand as much from our mobile devices. While away from the office, we can view database sessions, locks, kill sessions when needed, acknowledge alerts, gauge the urgency of alarms, review server performance, perform database space analysis, and much more. Because our customers rely on timely responses, having the ability to perform many DBA activities while away from the office is beneficial to our customers and DBA life/work balance.

Reporting:

Conclusion