Database System Performance Monitoring

Databases can store information for your enterprise and are often responsible for communicating data to your applications to service end users. Due to the key role databases play in your business operations, an efficient database can be crucial for application performance.

Database system tuning is the process of making changes to your database system to improve database performance. By monitoring database health and tuning system performance, you can more easily ensure streamlined database retrieval and help prevent bottlenecks.

In database system monitoring, controlling and reporting your database operations can be critical to successful application performance. Database monitoring software can allow you to keep track of server metrics in real time, so you can more quickly identify deficiencies in system resources and bottlenecks in your database sources.

A database monitoring system can help you make applications smoother by providing an adaptive approach to monitoring database system performance.

Database monitoring often requires understanding a comprehensive set of metrics by drilling down into the health and functionality of your databases in the cloud, locally, or hybrid. With performance indicators operating across OSI layers, database system monitoring tools can help you more easily optimize performance by collecting and reporting metrics from servers, virtual infrastructure, and databases in a centralized view. A database monitoring system is designed to provide optimization and tuning support to more easily allow you to improve performance to achieve uninterrupted data retrieval and a stronger end-user experience.

Database system monitoring tools can provide services to help you identify system inefficiencies that may lead to bottlenecks. Understanding infrastructure metrics like CPU utilization, memory, and disk space can allow you to identify impending resource shortages more easily before they affect the end-user experience. Similarly, client statistics and query data can help you detect unusual activity in your end-user communications that may contribute to downtime.

To perform database system performance monitoring effectively, your database system monitoring tools should collect relevant database metrics in real time.

To better control and report on bottlenecks to database system, monitoring tools can collect key metrics to help you better understand and proactively solve for potential performance issues. These metrics include:

• OS performance indicators: Preventing application downtime requires an understanding of your system resource availability. Tuning and monitoring database system performance starts with metrics like CPU, network statistics, memory, and disk capacity. 
• Metrics from SQL sources: If you’re operating a SQL database, effective database management requires monitoring and tuning for your unique system. Your database system performance monitoring tools should include agents that can collect specialized metrics from MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis sources. 
• Metrics from NoSQL sources: MongoDB database sources require you to monitor MongoDB operations and connections. Tuning and monitoring database system performance begins with metrics available in the MongoDB “serverStatus” command.
• Host metrics: Your database host communicates with end users, and effective database monitoring tools can collect database-agnostic metrics for host performance. Login attempts, connection statistics, and query metrics are components of host data that can affect your end-user experience.
  

Database system performance monitoring software like SolarWinds Database Observability can provide out-of-the-box dashboards to monitor multiple database systems, so you can configure the right metrics to track the performance of databases and identify potential bottlenecks in those systems. 

To identify the root cause of performance issues, SolarWinds Database Observability allows you to view database health metrics in a unified dashboard, with graphical visualization of metrics over time. With real-time database monitoring using a web-based SaaS application, Database Observability allows you to engage with database metrics more easily from a user-friendly control center. 

Database Observability provides dashboards for individual metrics and categories for an intuitive approach to database system performance monitoring. If you receive an alert about a database system issue, graphical visualization in Database Observability can allow you to identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks by showing time-series graphs for each metric collected more easily.