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Databases for Senior Developers - Monitoring Databases with Tools

Posted by Lukas Vileikis on Nov 3, 2021 9:30:00 AM
Lukas Vileikis

If you are a Senior developer, you probably have a lot of things on your plate. From mentoring junior developers to taking on large amounts of web development work, sometimes it might seem like you don’t even have the time to do anything else – however, the monitoring of databases is something that bothers every senior developer at least once in their career – they might ask questions like how do we do that? When? What tools do we use? 

Monitoring database instances manually can be very tedious and time-consuming – especially if you have a lot of database servers to take care of. However, don’t fret because there is a solution – with dbWatch, you can monitor all kinds of database instances from Oracle and Sybase to MySQL, MSSQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. 

 

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What Should You Expect From A Monitoring Tool? 

If you come from monitoring your database instances manually, it is probable that you will ask this question sometime in the future: just what exactly can you expect from a monitoring tool? It should do everything you can do as a DBA just as well like you do it. wWhy bother setting up complex tools in the first place? 

There are a few reasons: 

  • Automation – with tools like dbWatch, your database maintenance tasks will be automated, meaning that you can forget about downtime, or taking a glance at slow queries on and off – everyone knows how busy senior developers are, so just leave that to dbWatch and go do your work – you already have a lot of things on your plate, don’t you?
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  • Monitoring – this is where tools like dbWatch can shine too. By monitoring the capacity, availability, security, and performance of your database instances, dbWatch can make sure that you – a senior developer – don’t waste time on things that can be monitored by tools developed by database professionals instead. 
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  • Security – a good database administration tool will also provide one (or a couple) of ways to care about security. After all, what’s performance without a few bits and pieces of security on top of it, right? 
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  • Capacity – running out of disk space? Oh, no! Will you have to run to system administrators in the company to explain and rant about them being unable to properly set up disks when necessary? Not with dbWatch: you will be alerted instead. 

As you can see, there are quite a few reasons why you should consider a monitoring tool: it can save senior developers precious time, which they can use to monitor, say, junior web developers or do their work without constant stress about database performance, availability, capacity, or security. 

 

Monitoring Databases with dbWatch 

If you’re a senior developer searching for a tool to help you monitor your database instances, you’re in luck because dbWatch can offer just what you need. dbWatch is a fully-fledged database monitoring tool that can help you in your daily work as a database administrator and as a senior developer too. A frequent problem that senior developers have is that they are just too busy doing their work, but databases need monitoring too: some of them usually are pretty excited to learn how to monitor the database instances relevant to the business they are working in, but soon that excitement fades: they learn that they need to take care of availability, capacity, performance... Oh, and there’s also security. There are not that many senior developers that can take up these levels of responsibility. 

Thankfully, we have dbWatch – simply launch the tool ,and you will be presented with a whole new world related to your database instances: 

 

 

As you can see above, dbWatch will provide you with a couple of useful metrics: it will tell you what issues your database has, how many of your database instances have lost connection, and how many of your database instances fall under statuses like “alarm”, “warning”, or “OK”.

Here a value of “OK” means that all of your database jobs have been completed without any issues, a value of “Warning” means that some of your database jobs provided some advice that would need further inspection, and a value of “Alarm” means that there are some database jobs that need immediate further attention. 

Head over to one of your database instances to feel the real power of the tools that any kind of developer can put to use: 

 

 

As you can see, the SQL Server database instance has a lot of database jobs that can be of assistance to it: as usual, all of these database jobs are split across a couple of categories (in this case, availability, capacity, cluster, and replication, maintenance, and performance), and each of those categories can be of assistance when solving different issues encountered by senior developers.

Take, for example, performance: just implemented a feature to a web application and now it’s slow? Perhaps it’s using up all of your memory, but you have no way to check it – no issues here: just run the Instance memory check database job, and you will be provided with all of the details that will let you decide what actions should you take: 

 

In this case, we are alright, but there may be occasions where more than 90% of the available memory on the server would be occupied: in that case, we would need to come back to our development work and make the application take up fewer resources for execution. 

However, that’s not everything that’s offered by dbWatch – we can also monitor all of the inventory of our database instances. An overview of how our database management could look like is shown below: 

 

 

The option we have selected allows us to monitor our database farms – as you can see, this module also has a lot of things that could be used by Senior developers and web developers alike such as resource overview or activity overview: choosing activity overview, for example, would allow Senior developers to get an overview of the sessions that are (or were) running inside of their database instances, the page would also display the total amount of sessions allocated to each platform.

A section for backup overview, on the other hand, would display the total backup size per platform in megabytes, how much do the backups weigh when compressed, what databases are included in the backup, etc.: talk about saving time for yourself as a senior developer. 

We could go on talking about the things that dbWatch can help you improve on as a senior developer, but by now you should get the point – tools like dbWatch can be of assistance when solving your database problems, so why not try it? If you would have any issues, the support team would gladly assist you, so have no fear and do it today! 

 

 

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Other blogs:

Sessions in Databases: To monitor or not to monitor?

What is the size of database instances? MySQL edition

 

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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.

 

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

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