About the Author:
Chad Pabalan is a Pre-Sales Engineer for dbWatch and a DBA specializing in SQLServer high availability setups and disaster recovery planning and configurations. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, a cloud enthusiast specializing in architecture and designing scalable, high available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS Cloud.
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Big and small enterprises alike are moving to a DevOps methodology to provide faster and better services to their clients and customers. The increase in demand of DevOps Engineers has been exponential to support development practices that use the DevOps methodology.
But first, let's discuss why is there a sudden shift to the DevOps principles?
Applying the DevOps principles means that their businesses can adapt to the growing needs of their clients; they can quickly expand and add new features requested by their customers. DevOps aims to achieve the following: version control, automation, testing, continuous deployment/integration, monitoring, and continuous operations.
DevOps ensures improved scalability by restructuring or modifying processes within your server infrastructure. This is most important when you are running your system in the Cloud (AWS/Azure) environment. Enterprises should configure their servers to be flexible and cater to the growing number of users connecting to their system by automatically increasing the resource/servers - scaling horizontally or vertically depending on the load running on their servers.
It is crucial to have monitoring solutions in place to keep track of their servers' health, such as database servers, web servers, etc.
Databases built on scalable servers are the backbone of many large and growing businesses worldwide. And whether your organization's databases store client and stock information or log millions of transactions a day, having server administration services that can keep up and continue to keep you informed on performance and with crucial data is vital.
As the business and the server infrastructure continue to expand, it's important to have monitoring and management solutions that can scale with your infrastructure.
As a DBA/DevOps Engineer, you need to stay on top of server performance and auditing even when your business's hardware scales far beyond its original size.
If you are looking for scalable solutions to support your enterprise databases, there are some key features to look out for and several important things to keep in mind.
Here are four of the most important:
Tailored Services
Every business is different; companies have multiple IT teams to solve various problems and build solutions depending on their needs. Databases are essential to maintain your organizational data; that's why it is vital to make sure your servers are monitored and proactively managed by solutions that ease your burden as a DBA/DevOps Engineer.
While some tools/solutions provide only limited customization and flexibility, scalable tools are designed to work with any number of databases and integrate with any database platform. Server management tools like this can also be modified or customized by DBAs/Developers to fit their business's existing workflow, provide customized audits and reports, and fit in with other tools and processes already in use.
Service Availability
Maintaining the highest possible server availability is vital, no matter what industry you work with. And just as you aim for 100% service availability with your IT infrastructure, the tools you rely on should be available whenever your team needs them.
As a DBA/DevOps Engineer, you should choose a reliable, proven solution with a proven track record of working with databases across hundreds or thousands of servers. A solution that will allow you to have constant access to real-time data and ensure that you will be up to date on your database server's health status.
Real-Time Alerts
If your servers and database are critical to your business, real-time alerts for both security and performance issues are significant features to look for.
Whether you are handling sensitive data or not, having alerts enabled to notify you of any possible attacks or breaches is a vital step in server security. Likewise, being notified of any slow-downs or downtime can help you keep your systems open to internal colleagues and external clients, increasing availability and ensuring a smoother service.
Alerts like these are helpful for businesses operating any number of servers, with dbWatch Control Center able to work on scalable tools for growing businesses and databases spread across hundreds or even thousands of servers.
Compliance
The tools and services you choose should make it easier for your team and your business to be secure and compliant.
The right scalable monitoring and management solution will provide provision for proper monitoring of your database, servers, and traffic, institute security measures for internal and external access, and give your staff the means to be compliant with any relevant regulations.
Often this means giving staff different roles in the maintenance of your databases or servers, and the tools you use should allow this. The auditing tools that you use should be verifiable and secure, too, to allow you and other managers to ensure that the system is running smoothly, and that data is secured and protected at all times.
Whether you already use multiple database platforms with a corresponding set of tools or are thinking about moving to a new scalable solution, it's essential to consider your business's needs. Scalable tools have the power to grow alongside your business and to give you the control that you need, no matter how big your business becomes.
Summary
With dbWatch Control Center as your partner in monitoring and managing your database servers helps you achieve the following:
- - Proactive monitoring dashboards displays a health overview of all databases within your data center. Provides you the necessary information for you to take proactive action against possible issues
- - Complete information of your growing databases in your data centers, such as your total allocated hardware resources, and resource utilization like your CPU, memory, and disk usage
- - Allow customization and tailored services depending on your business needs and requirements
- - Maintains proactive monitoring and ensures high availability of your servers
- - Delivers real-time alerts for performance metrics and identify which databases are having problems in your data center
- - Allows you to be compliant with business standards and ensure that you as a DBA or DevOps engineer have a complete inventory and audit of the total databases that the business is using
You can try Control Center today. Use this link to download a version of dbWatch that can monitor up to 5 instances for 6 months for free: dbWatch Control Center free license
If you have any questions or you would like to know more on how dbWatch can assist you in your current enterprise database monitoring and management situation, feel free to contact me directly: chadwick@dbwatch.com
For more information, visit www.dbWatch.com or the dbWatch wiki pages
