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How to select the right database monitoring tool for your business

Posted by Andreas Hope on Oct 18, 2017 9:02:00 AM
Andreas Hope
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Database performance has an impact on almost every part of your business. From helping your staff to efficiently carry out their daily tasks to enabling customers and clients to get a good experience when accessing your services, the smooth running of your database and servers is essential for a well-functioning business.

But keeping your databases running smoothly is only possible with the correct tools in place - and you can only really address performance issues if you have a reliable monitoring system too.

Choosing the correct database monitoring tool to suit your needs is important - without it you could be left out of pocket and with an incomplete picture of what’s going on with your business. Here, we’ll explain how to go about selecting the right database monitoring tool for your organisation:

Compatibility

The first thing to look for when choosing a new database tool is ensuring that it will be compatible with your current and future server setup. This means choosing a tool that works across all of the platforms and versions that you run and that can support the number of servers that you currently use and plan to be using in the future.

Scalable tools can typically be used to monitor and manage large numbers of servers using a variety of different platforms. Before adopting a new tool, check with the developer to make sure that your tool of choice will remain relevant to your business for a long time to come.

Alerts and Reporting

Having access to current and historical data is useful for many organisations, and being able to make well-informed business decisions from reports or adjust IT workflow depending on server load can be essential in fast-moving industries or large businesses.

Many tools are capable of providing reports and real-time monitoring of hardware usage and performance across a large number of servers, including disk space, CPU usage, memory and availability. Finding a tool that can provide all of these services across a large number of varied servers is key for large and growing businesses in practically every industry.

Alerts are often built into tools too, adding the ability to provide real-time warnings about performance, resourcing, and other key variables. Alerts like these can give DBAs and IT teams the ability to quickly react to sudden changes and to respond to poor performance that could have a negative impact on staff and customers.

Cost Of Adoption

As with any purchase your business makes, it’s important to consider the cost of adopting a new tool. With this in mind, consider the cost per instance of the software that you plan to deploy, and think about how the new tool will fit into your current business.

Time spent on training and adopting workflows can be hidden costs for a business too, and so any tool that you choose should ideally provide a unified and relatively simple interface for staff to use - both speeding up adoption time and making life easier for DBAs.

Do Your Research

Ultimately, it’s important to do your research when selecting the right database monitoring tool for your business. As we’ve said, adopting a tool can be costly, so it’s important to get it right first time.

Before you make a decision, think carefully about what exactly you need from a tool and then speak with the developers of tools to make certain that they offer what you’re looking for. Check with them that they’re not planning on dropping support for systems like yours, and make sure that your future goals align with what they’ve got in store further down the line.

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