Monitoring Database Environment
All IT experts know the importance of monitoring the health of a database environment and how doing so has a major impact on the stability and availability of data, right?
The truth is your DBAs are feeling stretched, overwhelmed, and overworked. Due to evolving business operations, your environment is continually growing, and that’s great news, or is it? Well, it isn’t if enterprise-wide monitoring of availability, performance, and growth is decentralized, disjointed across environments, divided amongst multiple third-party solutions, or worse if it simply doesn’t exist at all.
A large-scale effort to implement enterprise-wide monitoring seems overwhelming, especially when there are so many immediate fires to fight.
Stop the Fire-Fighting and Reduce Costs
Put away the extinguisher and recognize that fighting fires is not the most efficient way to operate your business. What if you could proactively manage growth, performance, and availability, as well as predict and remediate issues before they occur? And what if you could optimize your environment using less time and also cut down on your operational costs?
There are secure, platform-independent centralized monitoring solutions that are easier to configure and scale than ever before. These solutions greatly increase the stability of your data. Centralized Remote Database Monitoring proactively detects issues before they negatively impact your customers and they also prevent your staff from spending countless hours maintaining, monitoring, and checking disparate alerts.
Easily Scalable with Less Labor
Centralized Monitoring Solutions are Easily Scalable and Less Labor Intensive to Maintain. Rather than deploying the same set of jobs across many servers, a centralized approach utilizes a consolidated set of jobs that reside on a single server. A secure agent then connects to each server within your environment. The agent gathers data for analysis and forecasting and it relays any alerts. By using a centralized approach, monitoring becomes easier to configure and more efficient to maintain and expand.
Reduce The Time Spent Reviewing Alerts
Rather than having staff scan through multiple success and failure emails, which stand the risks of either getting lost in an inbox and costing more time than necessary, centralized Remote Database Monitoring solutions consolidate alerts and send a single email that lists results across the entire environment, greatly reducing the time and effort needed to detect issues.
Did you know?
The monthly cost of monitoring is much lower than the cost of a full-time DBA. Monthly monitoring eliminates the responsibility of daily support allowing staff to redirect their time and attention to other areas of business operations.
Increase Environment Stability
Centralized Remote Database Monitoring can detect failed jobs and missed backups where typical, server-centric methods fail. Missed backups are detected even if maintenance plans are mistakenly modified or new databases are added. Failed jobs can be detected even if a SQL Agent does not restart on a particular server.
Discover Opportunities for Optimization
During the setup process, multiple opportunities for efficiency and optimization will often appear. This alone makes up for the cost of implementation. Remote Database Monitoring solutions make it easy to collect data that allows you to:
- Detect and retire inactive databases, reclaiming important disk space
- Detect and close previously undetected maintenance gaps
- Discover opportunities for database server consolidation, reducing the costs associated with software licensing and hardware operation and support
Improve Planning and Budgeting
Be proactive, not reactive. Remote Database Monitoring solutions can store historical data across your environment. That’s worth repeating. You can trend and forecast collected data allowing issues to be predicted before they occur. This has a huge impact on your budget and time. Properly planning for increased assets has a far less impact on your budget. The ability to pinpoint underutilized assets can further save funds.
To gain the greatest efficiency, solutions with built-in trending reports should track the following information:
- Disk space growth
- File size
- Performance indicators
- Database inactivity
What to Look for in a Monitoring Solution or Service
When evaluating monitoring methods and tools, consider tools with a consolidated monitoring framework. Minimize the number of emails from each server; too many, and the risk of missing critical issues increases. Monitoring should be easy to set up, scale, and maintain.
Prodative® Watchdog EMS, a solution designed by experts at Aspect, consolidates the monitoring and alerting process across your entire environment regardless of platform. A web-based portal displays alerts and a summary of all alerts are sent daily in a single email.
