As a database administrator dealing with SQL Server, MariaDB, or other database instances, you probably know a thing or two about database systems. If you’ve worked with certain database platforms in the past then you have probably taken a look at various database “inventories.” You’ve likely delved into what database instances consist of, what platforms or systems they support and their size.
In this blog, you’ll learn a little more about such database inventories.
What is a Database Inventory?
Database inventory, in its simplest form, refers to everything a given database instance consists of – its platform, its edition, version, resources (memory and disk, etc.), given backups related to it, and so on, and so forth.
The monitoring of database platforms and database inventories is a near-daily task of every database administrator – if you find yourself wondering why, think about it. What kind of a database administrator wouldn’t want to know how his or her database instances are doing? Enough of tedious monitoring – just glance at your database inventory, and you will know everything. As easy as it gets!
Database Inventory in dbWatch
As far as dbWatch is concerned, it can provide you with a very good overview of your database inventory too.
How? Well, everything’s simple. Launch dbWatch, import your database instances into the platform, and you will be able to navigate towards a bunch of different options:
- Monitoring capability, in the menu at the top as ‘the heart’
- Management, the second one from the top (see the gear icon next to a database icon?)
- Database farms, the third one from the top (That’s the silos)
Essentially, by monitoring your “database farms” (multiple database instances) you will be able to see an inventory overview provided by dbWatch. Remember how we said that a database inventory refers to everything you have inside of your databases? Yeah, you will be able to see everything here too!
The things that will be monitored in you “database inventory” include your
- Database platforms
- Additions
- Versions
- Points relating to your database memory and storage
- Information about backup and maintenance
The database inventory functionality can be really useful if you find yourself with multiple database instances of the same type (say, if you find yourself working with MySQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, or other database instances as well):
In addition, you will be able to see the status of a given database instance, its name, version, port, how many databases you have, etc. – if you have a lot of database instances, can you imagine remembering these kinds of things manually?
It’s convenient. dbWatch also provides you with the status of your disks and memory (we don’t have many MySQL instances imported for this example, so our example “inventory” is small, but you get the point.) However, if you find yourself even with one or two database instances, you will still be able to keep an eye out on your database jobs and their status as seen below.
Should you find yourself running many database jobs on a lot of database instances, you can observe them all here. dbWatch also provides you with the status of your jobs, including the number of the database jobs you have scheduled.
However, the monitoring of your database jobs might not be enough, so you will be able to observe the activity of your database instances, too. dbWatch can also split the monitoring into platforms as well. In this case, dbWatch will provide you with the amount of total and active sessions, the amount of total sessions per platform, per version, and per instance, etc.:
See that the amount of your active sessions is abnormal? Time to kill some of them! You should get the point by now.
Summary
Your database inventory consists of multiple important things. dbWatch can help you monitor all of them.
Need to check how your database jobs are doing? No problem, head over to the Farm jobs section.
Curious how many database instances are currently being monitored by dbWatch? No issues here as well, dbWatch can help you monitor them per platform, per edition, or also per version. If you are backing up your data, the dbWatch inventory overview page will also provide you with some valuable information regarding backups such as the total backup size per platform, how much your backups weigh in megabytes, how much do they weigh when compressed, etc.
Finally, you can also get a very good overview of the activity that is going on inside your database instances too – dbWatch will provide you with the number of total sessions and active sessions, total sessions per platform, the number of total sessions per top 20 instances, etc.: monitoring of your database inventory can be a very easy and fast way to put your database instances towards the fast lane of performance, availability, and capacity at the same time.
Try dbWatch today and see how it performs!
