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Monitoring Database Disk and Memory Usage with dbWatch

Posted by Lukas Vileikis on Jul 21, 2021 7:30:00 AM
Lukas Vileikis

If you're a regular reader of the dbWatch blog, you have probably noticed that it teaches you how to do a bunch of different things ranging from monitoring your SQL server error logs to restoring your databases with the dbWatch Control Center at the helm. What the dbWatch blog hasn't covered much, though it includes monitoring your disk space used by your database instances and the relevant memory usage implications. 

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Why Should You Monitor the Disk and Memory Used by Your Databases? 

As far as any kind of database management system is concerned, monitoring the disk and memory consumed by your databases is essential because of a few factors: 

  • - Monitoring the disk space used by your database instances can quickly tell you if a database (or a table in a certain database) consumes too much space on the disk.  and should be looked into further. Maybe the table contains unnecessary data (that is, such data that’s not absolutely necessary) or too many indexes? What about partitions (they consume a lot of disk space, too) – do you need them? If a certain database instance uses too much space on the disk, the disks will probably need to be replaced for bigger ones, which means that there will be more expenses for your business. Moreover, monitoring the disk space used by database instances is essential for database administrators to ensure that their database instances perform at the very best of their ability. 
  • - Monitoring how much memory your databases consume can also be very useful, especially if your database instances are configured to consume more RAM than usual for performance purposes – when all of your RAM is used by some process in your database or your web application, you will probably experience the wrong side of high memory usage – the more memory your database instances use, the further the performance of your database will degrade. Slow performance of your database instances means that any database-related applications (for example, websites) will slow down too – slow web applications mean that your business will probably cause some headaches for your customers since the requests will complete much slower. Even worse, if the performance of your database (and, consequentially, any applications related to it) degrades, your business can say goodbye to new customers too. 

 

Monitoring Disk and Memory Usage with dbWatch 

Now that you know why you should monitor the disk and memory consumed by your database instances, you should probably know how to do that with dbWatch too. Keep in mind that tracking the disk and memory usage is not limited to one kind of database management system. Doing that will be useful regardless of whether you find yourself using MS SQL ServerOracleSybase and PostgreSQL, or MySQL. 

 

In general, to monitor your database instances with dbWatch: 

1. Open up dbWatch. 
2. Click on the Farm icon on the left side of the screen (that's the third icon from the top):

 

3. You will see several options come up towards the left side of the screen. Expand the Resource overview section to see the Disk and Memory options:

 

4. Now, observe the main window more towards the right side and you shall see something like this:

 

 

 

What Information Does dbWatch Provide? 

As you can see, there are two kinds of Information divided by the blue and pink colors – the blue represents disk usage while the pink one represents the memory used by your database instances. Neglecting to monitor one (or both) of those parameters can prove to be detrimental to your database instances (and, consequentially, your business), so none of those should be left out. dbWatch provides you with information regarding how much disk and memory your database instances consume in total, also how much total disk and memory space each database platform that your business runs consume. You can either read those values in numbers or, if you are not very fond of them, you can also look at the graphs. This information can be filtered or, if you have a desire, even printed. Make use of one (or both) of the parameters towards the right side of the "Total disk and memory usage (in GB)" text. Click the filter-like image for the filters to appear and click the picture next to it to print Information:

 

 

Here's how the printed document would look like in this case (if you had many database instances, dbWatch would be able to provide even more Information – in this scenario, one database instance was used):

Printing this Information out could prove helpful if you want to show the Information to your not-so-tech-savvy colleagues or print it out as a reminder. The filterability of dbWatch can also be beneficial if you have many database instances to monitor – if you have 50 database instances beginning with "demo," you could filter only the disk and memory usage used by them alone.  

 

 

Summary 

The monitoring of disk and memory space usage used by database instances is a near-daily task of almost every DBA. This task can easily become a hassle if done manually, so it would be beneficiato be automated. Thankfully, there is a solution – with dbWatch's expertise, this monotonous and sometimes time-consuming task can easily be automated. If you think that your business can put dbWatch's expertise to good use, make sure to try out dbWatch today and if you have any issues, be sure to have a look through the documentation or contact the team if you need any further assistance. 

 

 

Other Blogs:

Solving Database Issues in DevOps: dbWatch to the rescue

Automating Your Database Processes with dbWatch

 

Topics: database operations, sql server monitoring, sql monitoring tools, database monitoring, sqlmonitor, sqlperformance, sqlmanager

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