According to Redgate’s third annual State of Database Monitoring Report enterprises are reprioritizing cloud adoption and automated database monitoring due to the effects of Covid-19 and the global lockdown. The focus of business moves not only to ensuring application performance, but also security for remote working and ensuring business continuity.

The two biggest causes of problems with database management are human errors and ad hoc user access

Usually, the most common priorities for database professionals are performance and backups. In third and fourth places, people point out security management and user permissions. According to the respondents in the same research, the two biggest causes of problems with database management are human errors and ad hoc user access, which comes as a result of increased remote working and tasks being more widely distributed. Automated database monitoring seems to be the right solution to all these problems. 

Without solid monitoring in place, database outages can go unnoticed until it’s too late

Database health monitoring is a crucial aspect to ensure the application’s maintenance. Discovering database issues at the right time can ensure your applications remain healthy and accessible. Without solid monitoring in place, database outages can go unnoticed until it’s too late and the business is losing money and customers. Only 18% of companies today monitor manually the health of their database. In addition, third-party monitoring solutions reduce Average Time To Detection of deployment issues by 28%, and Average Time To Recovery by 22%.

But how to be sure, you have the right database health monitoring solution in place?

Industry experts advise choosing an agentless database monitoring software. In addition, it is always better to rely on an all-in-one monitoring solution, not only database monitoring software. The reason for this is that performance problems in databases are mostly caused by other components it is connected to, and in case of problems, it is necessary to look at server resources, disk system, and network components altogether. Proactive and automated database monitoring is the key to application reliability.

Key aspects to ensure database health and select database monitoring software

According to the best practices, the key aspects of your databases you need to track are:

• Databases availability and resource consumption – a good monitoring solution will alert you immediately if any of your databases are not online or accessible. If all of your databases are up and running, the next thing to monitor is the resource consumption – like CPU, memory, disk, and network.
• Expensive queries monitoring – It’s still possible to get poor database performance when everything is online and resources are not under pressure. This can happen for a number of reasons, including inefficient query plans, data skew, non-existent indexes, unmanaged database statistics, poor database design, blocking, or database schema changes. Troubleshooting these types of problems is usually harder and requires a certain degree of knowledge about database internals. It involves looking at query plans, joins, or filters used by the database query optimizer.

Troubleshooting database performance for expensive or slow queries starts with finding the queries that take a long time to run. These can be found from database logs. Once slow queries have been identified, further analysis can begin.

• Blocking queries analysis – In an ideal world, every query would be able to execute properly without being blocked by another query. In the real world, queries often block other queries and prevent their proper work. Understanding blocking and the reasons for it is vital, in order to ensure your smooth database performance. VirtualMetric provides full visibility over the reasons for block and helps you to eliminate them fast. 
• Database audit and change tracking – Database audits are important compliance components. By performing regular database audits you prevent the chances for data breaches or thefts. And you ensure your compliance. VirtualMetric gives you detailed reports on user activity in the database, changes made to user accounts, the user accesses to database servers, security breaches, and many more.

In times when people are working remotely all around the globe, you need to ensure the security of your internal IT systems and databases. Your data is a critical company asset. You need to be careful about the way it is managed and to ensure its integrity.

Automated agentless database monitoring tools like VirtualMetric help you to get full visibility over your databases, set up instant alerts and notifications on suspicious events, and be able to hold everything under control. Downtime or slowtime in the data layer can cost a huge amount of money and manhours to fix the problem. With a database monitoring tool, you can ensure your databases are performing as expected and also save your company’s resources.