If you are a database administrator dealing with SQL Server, MariaDB, or other database instances, you probably know a thing or two about database systems. If you found yourself working with certain database platforms in the past, you have probably taken a look at various database “inventories” – you have taken a look at what database instances consist of, what platforms or systems do they support, are they big or small, etc. – in this blog, we are going to tell you a little more about such database inventories.
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What is a Database Inventory?
Database inventory, in its simplest form, refers to everything a given database instance consists of – its platform, its edition, version, resources (memory and disk, etc.), given backups related to it, and so on, and so forth. The monitoring of database platforms and database inventories is a near-daily task of every database administrator – if you find yourself wondering why, think about it. What kind of a database administrator wouldn’t want to know how his or her database instances are doing? Enough of tedious monitoring – just glance at your database inventory, and you will know everything. As easy as it gets!
Database Inventory in dbWatch
As far as dbWatch is concerned, dbWatch can provide you with a very good overview of your database inventory too. How youdo you ask? Everything’s simple. Launch dbWatch, import your database instances into the platform, and you will be able to navigate towards a bunch of different options – the heart, for example, refers to the monitoring capability of dbWatch, the second one from the top (see the gear icon next to a database icon?) refers to management, the third one from the top refers to “database farms” (see icon below):
Essentially, by monitoring your “database farms” (multiple database instances) you will be able to see an inventory overview provided by dbWatch. Remember how we said that a database inventory refers to everything you have inside of your databases? Yeah, you will be able to see everything here too!
As you can see, the things that will be monitored in the so-called “database inventory” of yours include your database platforms, editions, and versions, things related to your database memory and storage, also some things related to backup and maintenance. The database inventory functionality can be really useful if you find yourself with multiple database instances of the same type (say, if you find yourself working with MySQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, or other database instances as well):
As you can see, you will be able to see the status of a given database instance, its name, version, port, how many databases you have, etc. – if you have a lot of database instances, can you imagine remembering these kinds of things manually?
Talk about convenience. If you think that’s it, however, you’re wrong! dbWatch will also provide you with the status of your disks and memory (we don’t have many MySQL instances imported for this example, so our so-called “inventory” is small, but you get the point.) However, if you find yourself even with one or two database instances, you will still be able to keep an eye out on your database jobs and their status – for example, just take a look:
Find yourself running a lot of database jobs on a lot of database instances? Observe them all here! Some database jobs, will, of course, be able to run in a more successful fashion than others, but it doesn’t hurt to see them all on one page, does it?
Have we also told you that dbWatch will provide you with the status of your jobs on this page as well? You will be able to see the number of the database jobs you have scheduled here too!
However, the monitoring of your database jobs might not cut it, so you will be able to observe the activity of your database instances, too – in this case, dbWatch can also split the monitoring into platforms as well. In this case, dbWatch will provide you with the amount of total and active sessions, the amount of total sessions per platform, per version, and per instance, etc.:
See that the amount of your active sessions is abnormal? Time to kill some of them! You should get the point by now.
Summary
Your database inventory consists of multiple important things – dbWatch can help you monitor absolutely all of them. Curious how database jobs of yours are doing? No problem, head over to the Farm jobs section. Curious how many database instances are currently being monitored by dbWatch?
No issues here as well, dbWatch can help you monitor them per platform, per edition, or also per version. If you are backing up your data, the dbWatch inventory overview page will also provide you with some valuable information regarding backups such as the total backup size per platform, how much your backups weigh in megabytes, how much do they weigh when compressed, etc.
Finally, you can also get a very good overview of the activity that is going on inside your database instances too – dbWatch will provide you with the number of total sessions and active sessions, total sessions per platform, the number of total sessions per top 20 instances, etc.: monitoring of your database inventory can be a very easy and fast way to put your database instances towards the fastlane of performance, availability, and capacity at the same time – if you are in doubt, give dbWatch a try and figure that out for yourself! You will certainly not be disappointed.
And if you need any assistance, it’s there for you at any time as well – reach out to the support team and you will receive the assistance you need quickly and efficiently. What’s not to like? Try dbWatch today and see how it performs!
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Other blogs:
The Basics of dbWatch Control Center: Database Jobs
The Basics of dbWatch Control Center the UI
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About the Author:
Lukas Vileikis is an ethical hacker and a frequent conference speaker.
Since 2014, Lukas has found and responsibly disclosed security flaws in some of the most visited websites in Lithuania.
He runs one of the biggest & fastest data breach search engines in the world - BreachDirectory.com, frequently speaks at conferences and blogs in multiple places including his blog over at lukasvileikis.com.
