If you are a databse-conscious developer or a database administrator and especially if you find yourself immersed in the dbWatch blog at least on-and-off, you already know how important it is to monitor your database resources, you know a couple of things about database jobs, and other database functionality. You probably already know a couple of things about your database resources as well – they are vital to improving your database functionality.
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What are Database Resources?
Database resources essentially refer to the things that make your database “come alive” – in other words, function at the best of its ability. Database resources can be split into multiple categories – they might refer to your database structure, indexes, partitions, even the disks and the memory of the operating system you use.
The monitoring of the database resources available within your database instances is an absolutely vital task for every database administrator or even a developer: how can you make sure that your databases perform at their best if you don’t? Thankfully, there are a couple of ways that make this kind of task easier for you. Enter dbWatch.
Monitoring Database Resources with dbWatch
As you might already know by now, dbWatch is a very powerful database-related tool that comes with many of its own unique features – one of those features is enabling you to monitor your database resources. Here’s how everything works:
- - dbWatch has database jobs – database jobs are essentially small database “workers” that are employed to work 24/7/365 no matter the weather outside – run one or a couple of them, and they will tell you how you should go about improving your database availability, performance, capacity, or security.
- - dbWatch enables you to monitor your database inventory – we have dived into this feature of dbWatch in one of our earlier blogs, but essentially, it enables you to get a very quick overview of the platforms, versions, and editions of the databases you use.
- - dbWatch, of course, enables you to run database queries on a given database instance, and it also enables you to get a very good overview of your database resources including resources both on the disk and memory.
Click on the database farm icon on the left-hand side (that’s the third icon from the top), and you will be able to see a quick overview of the database resources available for you to use:
As you can see, dbWatch will be able to provide you with information relevant to how many database hosts you have, how many database instances are you running, how much space does your database instances occupy on the disk, and how much memory is allocated to a given database instance.
You will also be able to see how much disk and memory is used by the top 20 most frequently used database instances of yours. Same thing with your memory! We don’t have much data inside of our database instances at present, but you get the point.
Head over to the management section of dbWatch and you will also be able to see how your database instances are doing on a deeper level – you will be able to gain some information regarding the version of the DBMS you elected to use, some information about its architecture, port, version, and configuration file location, also some information regarding logical reads per second or active and inactive sessions. dbWatch will also provide you the size (in megabytes) of your biggest databases and give you some insight into some of your memory configurations by providing you with a nice oval graph.
If you find yourself working with a lot of database instances too (say, if you’re running a database farm or similar) dbWatch will also provide you with the overview of the resources inside of them:
Isn’t that awesome? The resources of your database will thank you for their monitoring – by monitoring them you will be able to achieve higher performance, security, and reliability of your database instances. Should you have any issues, remember that the dbWatch support team will always be here to support you, so if you need anything, reach out to them. Enjoy using the tool!
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Other blogs:
What Does your Database Inventory Look like?
dbWatch multi-domain: A practical approach for your Oracle Database and SQL Server Database Farm
Inside of the activity of SQL Server: Are you monitoring it right?
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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.
