Databases and IT systems are the backbone of most businesses today – businesses of any size in any industry. From tracking transactions to hosting online services and storing business information, database servers are used for countless vital parts of companies, and business can grind to a halt if they’re not properly maintained and supported.
To know when it’s time to make those changes, and to see whether your business could benefit from IT infrastructure expansion, DBAs need to make use of database monitoring tools. With the right tools, IT staff can see at a glance what is holding their system back and put a plan in place to improve their services.
Here are just some of the ways in which database monitoring tools can help you to assess your need for database server expansion.
Real-time Alerts
A key part of any great database monitoring solution is a real-time alert system. Capable of alerting you and your team to system outages, usage spikes, poor performance or other issues, alerts give you the means to adopt a proactive approach to monitoring, to see exactly what areas of your system are falling behind and what effect that is having on your business. By configuring tools to monitor the weaknesses in your system, you can receive alerts to prompt action and to warn you of any impending problems. With the data that these alerts provide, you can then put a plan in place to make sure that problem doesn’t occur again. If the solution you have allows it, you can even extend your plan to include custom tasks to be scheduled to run whenever required, thereby achieving more automation and consistency in future.
Resource and Usage Monitoring
One of the most important jobs of any database tool is resource monitoring, whether virtual, cloud based, or otherwise, and this forms the basis of the alerts and reports mentioned elsewhere in this article. By keeping an active log of resource usage, including disk space and performance, CPU and memory usage, and other variables too, you can identify any bottlenecks and areas due for upgrade.
Database System Reports
In addition to real-time alerts, reports and longer-term logs produced by monitoring tools can be invaluable when assessing your database’s performance.
By producing reports that look at your usage and performance statistics, and server usage over a certain period of time, your team can properly assess the need for expansion. Times of day or week of heavy usage can be identified and capacity increased to compensate, and weaker parts of your infrastructure can be noted and replaced.
Reports backed up with facts and figures can also help DBAs to make a stronger case for investment into IT systems, providing a real-world example of how improved server systems could benefit the business.
