Database Monitoring Solutions

What to look for....

There is a plethora of database monitoring software products available in today's market place, so choosing the right one is often time consuming. Another difficulty is actually getting to the bottom of what each product can do, as it's often the case that the product website does not contain anywhere near enough technical information to make the decision easy! To be honest, I can sympathize with this to some extent, working for a vendor myself, as afterall we want to show people enough information to hook them in and then hopefully get them to try out the software as part of a proof of concept, or trial evaluation.

After working in the database performance management field for a good number of years (getting on for 8 years at last count), I've been in a great position to see what works and what doesn't. One of the observations I've made over the years is that many traditional tools and methodologies of looking at database performance don't work. In fact lots of companies have wasted a lot of time looking at the wrong statistics! and even more have wasted a lot of money looking at the wrong statistics!

Here is a list of my top 5 Key Features for a database monitoring tool

1. Low Overhead - the monitoring software must be production safe and not impact in any way on the workload of the databse
2. Detailed Data Collection - I guess this point is fairly obvious, but unless your monitoring software provides the level of detail required to locate the root cause of performance issues then it's fairly useless! The type of performance data that is of most use is in terms of resource consumption and wait events e.g. how much CPU a program has used during a specific time period, or which wait events were most prevalent during a problematic period. Other information of great use is statistics correlated to the SQL Statements themselves, e.g. how many buffer gets a statement does over time or per execution.
3. Current and Historical Data - many products give you a snapshot of what is happening now. Other products give you historical information, but with a lag. The best product will show you current performance and also a detailed history of performance, facilitating diagnostics after the event, and also giving you the ability to trend performance over time.
4. Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - many performance monitoring products are a complete nightmare to implement! Some are so big they come on multiple DVD's, and some are so difficult to install that you need to spend lots of money implementing and maintaining.
5. Common GUI for all Database Types - most companies these days have more than one enterprise database platform. Of course some will standardize on one type e.g. Oracle, it's more than likely that they have at least a couple.

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