Databases built on scalable servers are the backbone of many large and growing businesses in practically every industry around the world. And whether your organisation’s databases store client and stock information or log millions of transactions a day, having server administration services that can keep up and continue to keep you informed on performance and with key data is vital.
Because your business and your server infrastructure continue to expand, it’s important to have both monitoring and management solutions that can scale with them - helping you to stay up to date on server performance and auditing even when your business’s hardware scales far beyond its original size.
If you’re looking for scalable tools to support your organisation’s database servers, there are some key features to look out for and several important things to keep in mind. Here are four of the most important:
Tailored Services
Every business is different and every business has different IT and structural needs, and that’s why it’s important to make sure that your database servers are supported by tools that can be easily customised to meet your needs and environment.
While some tools provide only limited customisation and flexibility, scalable tools are often designed to work with database servers in any number and making use of any platform. Server management tools like this can also often be tailored by DBAs to fit their business’s existing workflow, providing customised audits and reports and fitting in with other tools and processes already in use.
Service Availability
Maintaining the highest possible server availability is vital, no matter your the industry you work in. And just as you aim for 100% service availability with your IT infrastructure, the tools that you rely on should be available whenever your team needs them.
By choosing a reliable, proven vendor with experience of working with databases across hundreds or thousands of servers for your scalable monitoring and management solution, you can ensure constant access to real-time data and will always be able to respond to urgent events.
Real-Time Alerts
Particularly if your servers and database are critical to your business, real-time alerts for both security and performance issues can be very important features to look for.
Regardless of whether you’re handling sensitive data or not, having alerts enabled to notify you of any possible attacks or breaches is a vital step in server security. Likewise, being notified of any slow-downs or down-time can help you to keep your systems open to both internal colleagues and external clients, increasing availability and ensuring a smoother service.
Alerts like these are helpful for businesses operating servers of any number, with dbwatch able to work on scalable tools for growing businesses and for databases spread across hundreds or even thousands of servers.
Compliance
Whether you need a compliant IT vendor to work with or not, the tools and services that you use should be chosen to make it easier for your team and your business to be secure and compliant.
The right scalable monitoring and management tools will provide provision for proper auditing of your database, servers and their traffic, institute security measures both for internal and external access, and give your staff the means to be compliant with any relevant regulations.
Often this means giving staff different roles in the maintenance of your databases or servers, and the tools you use should allow this. The auditing tools that you use should be verifiable and secure too, to allow you and other managers to ensure that the system is running smoothly and that data is secure at all times.
Whether you already make use of multiple database servers with a corresponding set of tools, or are thinking about moving to a new scalable system, it’s important to consider your businesses needs. Scalable tools have the power to grow alongside your business and to give you the control that you need, no matter how big your business becomes.
