Month: April 2021

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Managing Your Database Instances With Dbwatch

About the Author:

Lukas Vileikis is an ethical hacker and a frequent conference speaker.

Since 2014, Lukas has found and responsibly disclosed security flaws in some of the most visited websites in Lithuania.

He runs one of the biggest & fastest data breach search engines in the world – BreachDirectory.com, frequently speaks at conferences and blogs in multiple places including his blog over at lukasvileikis.com.

If you’re a database administrator dealing with a lot of database instances, you have probably noticed just how hard it is to keep track of all of your database instances at once, not even taking into account the fact that you have to keep up with the count of your database instances per platform and similar things. We have discussed database administration issues previously – we have discussed howcan dbWatch assist you in solving the MySQL issues you are facing;we have discussed how you shouldmonitor your InnoDB performance with dbWatch we have covered MyISAM too. This blog post will be a little bit different – now we will talk about how you should go about managing your database instances using dbWatch.
How do I Manage My Database Instances with dbWatch?
To start managing your database instances with dbWatch, first launch dbWatch, then add a database instance you want to monitor. Once you have done that, hover over the Monitor text at the top once again, then click on Management: 
Once you have clicked on Management, you will see a screen. Look to the left, select your database instance (in this example, we have used MySQL 5.7.26, but database management works with any other database management system, too), then select what you would want to glance at. Here are your options: 
You can see that you can look into your database instance configuration, performance, sessions, databases, or security. We will now go through each of those things. 
– The configuration part of the management part of dbWatch can help you see valuable information related to your database instance. It can help you see your database management system version, what server architecture it’s built on, what port it’s running on; it can help you see where the configuration file is located, and on top of other things, it lets you know the uptime of the database instance in question: 

– The management part of dbWatch can also help you see how your database instances perform, meaning that you can easily observe the running queries in your database instance, what database they are running on, etc. You can also see how long your queries are running and their state (running etc.) – that might help you determine whether you need to index your tables, what indexes you need to use etc. – you can also see how much of your CPU is used, what sessions are active or inactive, you can observe the buffer cache hit ratio, etc.: 

– You can also observe the performance reports. This part of dbWatch can tell you what database platforms your database instances use, help you observe what database instances use the most database space, what editions of database instances you use, etc. – you can also see how many hosts, instances, and databases are related to a specific dbWatch server. This list can also be filtered: 

– As far as performance is concerned, when using dbWatch you can also see an overview of the top 20 databases your database instance is running, what contents does your database have, how many logical reads per second your database is currently running, etc.: 
– You can also observe the contents of each of your databases – this part of dbWatch can be especially useful if you don’t want to or don’t have the ability to access, for example, phpMyAdmin to observe the contents of your databases: 
– You can also observe certain types of data (programmability, tables, and views) of a certain database:
– Finally, dbWatch can help you observe your databases’ security status, letting you observe how your database users look like from a security standpoint, how frequently they change passwords, what plugin is used to change their password, what host they have access to, etc. –hover over the Security section: 
– You can also use the management section of dbWatch to run SQL queries on your database instances if you want to. Again, this part of dbWatch can be helpful if you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin or if you don’t have the ability to SSH into your server and you need to run SQL queries: 
Summary
It’s pretty easy to manage your database instances with dbWatch – in that regard, dbWatch can help you if you need to observe the configuration of any of your database instances (e.g., it can be helpful if you need to see the specific directories in which the files related to the database are stored, the versions of your database management systems, etc.), dbWatch can help you observe the performance of your database instances letting you decide if you need to use indexes on any of your tables or not too. Since the security of your database instances isn’t out of the question too, dbWatch can also help you observe what parts of your server the database users can access; you can see what method is used to store passwords, when did the passwords get changed, the account lock status, etc. Suppose you don’t have the ability to SSH into your server or don’t have the ability to access, for example, phpMyAdmin. In that case, dbWatch also provides you with the ability to run SQL queries on any of your database instances.

Other Blogs:

Backing up your data with dbWatch Control Center: A practical guide Database monitoring: Customizing your views using Farm Data Language 
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