As every person in IT knows, monitoring the health of your database environment is extremely important for the stability and availability of your data, but… your DBA staff is stretched thin and overworked, your environment is continually growing due to evolving business operations, and pretty soon any attempt at enterprise-wide monitoring of availability, performance, and growth is de-centralized, disjointed across environments and/or multiple third-party solutions, or 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.
Read on to discover why implementing Remote Database Monitoring is worth it:
Stop the Fire-Fighting and Cut Costs
Fighting fires is not the most efficient way to conduct business. If you could proactively manage growth, performance, and availability, and predict and remediate issues before they occur, all while spending less time, you can optimize your environment AND cut your operational costs.
There are new secure, platform-independent, centralized monitoring solutions on the market that are easier to configure and scale and that can greatly increase the stability of your data. Centralized Remote Database Monitoring solutions proactively detect issues before they impact your customers AND free your staff from excessive time spent maintaining monitoring and checking disparate alerts.
Here are the top three reasons it’s worth the effort to implement a proactive Remote Database Monitoring Solution:
1. Free Your Staff
Centralized Monitoring Solutions are Easily Scalable and Less Labor Intensive to Maintain:
Rather than deploying the same set of jobs across 100 servers, a centralized approach utilizes a consolidated set of jobs that reside on a single server. A secure agent, like Windows Server Agent, connects to each server within your environment, gathers data for analysis and forecasting, and relays any alerts. Using a centralized approach, monitoring is easy to configure, and more efficient to maintain and expand.
Reduce The Time Spent Reviewing Alerts:
Rather than forcing your staff to scan through multiple success and failure emails that can easily become lost in an inbox, 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.
Look for solutions that provide portal access for viewing alerts –further simplifying the issue detection and remediation process.
Implement Remote Monitoring as a Service for Greatest Efficiency Gains:
For even greater efficiency, it makes sense to implement Remote Database Monitoring as a service. The monthly cost of monitoring is much less than the cost of a full time DBA resource and it frees your DBA staff from the responsibility of daily support, allowing you to concentrate your internal resources on more strategic, long-range business operations.
2. Increase Environment Stability
Nothing Slips Through the Cracks:
Centralized Remote Database Monitoring can detect failed jobs and missed backups where typical, server-centric methods fall down. Missed backups are detected even if maintenance plans are mistakenly modified or new databases added, and failed jobs can be detected even if a SQL Agent does not restart on a particular server.
Discover Opportunities for Optimization:
Simply setting up enterprise-wide monitoring will often uncover multiple opportunities for efficiency and optimization that more than make 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, and reclaim important disk space.
- Detect and close previously undetected maintenance gaps, so that you have the peace of mind that all of your data is recoverable.
- Discover opportunities for database server consolidation, reducing the costs associated with software licensing and hardware operation and support.
3. Improve Planning and Budgeting
Be Proactive, Not Reactive
Remote Database Monitoring solutions have the ability to store historical data across your environment. You can trend and forecast collected data so you can predict issues before they occur, for less impact on your budget and time.
Planning for increased assets has less impact on your budget, and the ability to pinpoint underutilized assets can further save you money.
To gain the greatest efficiency, look for solutions with built in trending reports that track the following information:
- Disk space growth
- File size
- Performance indicators
- Database inactivity
What to Look for in a Monitoring Solution or Service:
When you evaluate monitoring methods and tools, look for tools with a consolidated monitoring framework. You want to ensure that your Admins are not inundated with a high number of emails from each server, increasing the risk of missing critical issues that are buried too deeply in an inbox, and you want monitoring to be easy to set up, expand, and maintain.
New tools, such as Aspect Consulting’s Prodative® Watchdog EMS consolidate the monitoring and alerting process across your entire environment, regardless of platform. You can view alerts via a web-based portal, and all alerts are summarized in a single daily email.
About the Author:
Mike McDonnell is senior Data Architect/DBA with 20+ years’ experience.  As a Data Architect and Project Manager, he leads client teams to design, develop, test and implement custom applications, hardware and software upgrades, migrations or enhancements. In addition, Mike provides ongoing support both internally and for multiple clients as a remote Oracle and SQL server DBA, supporting all activities related to the administration of computerized databases. He excels in troubleshooting issues, and remediating performance issues.
