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Tips: How you can achieve a cost-efficient database farm with dbWatch Enterprise Manager 12

Posted by Chad Pabalan on Oct 22, 2020 4:39:22 AM
IT planning within an enterprise is crucial, whether you are a startup company or a big enterprise that is undergoing major changes. You need the full cooperation from various teams within the company and work together to determine how to improve the business, when it comes to finances, infrastructure, new projects, etc.
 
For example, your CTO has decided to migrate various applications and database systems from physical servers to vm servers. He would also like to migrate from one database platform to another for budgetary reasons. These changes should be carefully planned. Proper communication or coordination within the business and its key members determine the success of this project.

Having said that, another focus of the management is to save IT cost without undermining the efficiency and reliability of the whole IT infrastructure.

We will discuss key points that will help you analyze and identify resources for optimization, achieve cost efficiency by tracking license usage, and save time and money by properly utilizing available resources.

 

Here are the key points:

Analyze resource data – disk usage rate, disk/ memory free space unused/used servers

Task Automation – automate routine tasks to save DBAs (Database Administrator) time

Database licensing and feature usage

 

  • Analyze Resource Data
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  • Daily operations in an enterprise might generate terabytes to petabytes of data. It could be customer transactions, employee records, operations data, reporting data for data warehousing and many more.
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  • Proper handling of this data can help your company gain opportunities to make the best business decisions. In an enterprise database farm, you need to have the proper tools to analyze data within the farm. You need determine instances or servers which has been over provisioned or under provisioned with resources, identify CPU and memory utilization of each server.
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  • dbWatch is an enterprise monitoring and management solution that helps you keep track of your overall server utilization and keeps track of instances that are over or underutilized.
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  • This will help you and your management decide whether to purchase, consolidate or maybe re-provision some resources to servers that needs more power which leads to cost savings, because you don’t need to buy expensive resources if you can just consolidate resources that are rarely used.
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  • Here is a simple example of a dbWatch dashboard which gives you the overview of your memory and disk usage within your database farm.
  • In the screenshot below you can see the key indicators like the total physical memory usage(Physical (MB)) for each instance, Physical disk usage per instance.
Database Memory Dashboard
 
 
With the overview available you can easily determine which instances uses the most/least memory resource.
In the screenshot below you can see the key indicators like the Instance Usage percentage, Number of disk volumes allocated per instance, Size in GB per volume.
Disk Usage Dashboard
 
Having this overview, especially when you are managing a large number of database instances within your enterprise, helps you have full control of your database farm. It will help you make better decisions when doing your server consolidation. Instead of buying new hardware resources, you can easily save money by re-purposing some excess resources available.
 
 
 
Task Automation
 
Working as a DBA (Database Administrator) or developer we always find a way to make tasks simpler and easier; focusing on automating tasks that we work on daily.
 
When managing a database farm with a large number of instances you cannot simply execute your maintenance scripts manually for each database. When monitoring that number of instances, it is very inefficient to log in remote and manually connect on each server just to check the performance, status, running jobs of each instance.
 
dbWatch helps you monitor and automate your routine maintenance tasks so that you can focus on more critical tasks.
In the screenshot below, you can see the maintenance tab wherein dbWatch displays the various maintenance tasks which were executed on different instances.
 
Here you can see that key indicators - Number of Database (DB) Checked, Number of index rebuild/reorganize, disk space before rebuilding, disk space after rebuilding, total reduction size.
 
 
Index Maintenance Dashboard
 
You can easily schedule various maintenance task and dbWatch will automate all the routine tasks on your database farm. dbWatch also can automate your monitoring by configuring alerts and notifications refer to the article - Performance alerts and notification with dbWatch to learn more.
 
 
 
 
Database licensing and feature usage
 
It is necessary to keep track of your database licensing especially when using Oracle databases where  each feature has a certain cost. You need to have an audit of features enabled within your database farm to avoid unexpected charged from using these functions.
As an example, consider a scenario where the manager asks his team how they can track the various features that are currently enabled within a specific Oracle instance they have. This could be relevant and important, as he needs to know if they have added costs coming using certain features of Oracle. 
 
dbWatch can keep track of the Oracle licensing within each instance, show all Oracle features enabled within the instance and display information if an option being used has an extra cost. 
 
This table that shows the extra cost features of Oracle, underneath are the features and if it is currently used, you will also see when the feature was first/last used.
 
 
oracle-licensing-table
 
The screenshot shows a report generated in dbWatch along with Oracle component features being used within the instance.
 
oracle-component-usage
With this information we would be aware of our Oracle instance licensing and the features that has an added cost to avoid unexpected charges using Oracle. This feature is very useful for internal auditing and cost control.
Those three tips will help you save time and money, by analyzing data intelligently, automation and licensing auditing of instances within your database farm.
 
If you have any questions or would like to know more on how dbWatch can assist you on your current enterprise database monitoring and management situation.
please contact us through the email: info@dbwatch.com so that we could schedule a meeting.
 
For more information visit www.dbWatch.com or wiki.dbWatch.com/ControlCenter
 
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Topics: cost-effective, database automation, database operations, sqlmonitor, databaseoperations, oraclelicensing, indexmaintenance

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