IT planning within an enterprise is crucial, whether you are a startup company or a big enterprise that is undergoing major changes. You need the full cooperation from various teams within the company and work together to determine how to improve the business, when it comes to finances, infrastructure, new projects, etc.
For example, your CTO has decided to migrate various applications and database systems from physical servers to vm servers. He would also like to migrate from one database platform to another for budgetary reasons. These changes should be carefully planned. Proper communication or coordination within the business and its key members determine the success of this project.
Having said that, another focus of the management is to save IT cost without undermining the efficiency and reliability of the whole IT infrastructure.
We will discuss key points that will help you analyze and identify resources for optimization, achieve cost efficiency by tracking license usage, and save time and money by properly utilizing available resources.
Here are the key points:
Analyze resource data – disk usage rate, disk/ memory free space unused/used servers
Task Automation – automate routine tasks to save DBAs (Database Administrator) time
Database licensing and feature usage
Analyze Resource Data
Daily operations in an enterprise might generate terabytes to petabytes of data. It could be customer transactions, employee records, operations data, reporting data for data warehousing and many more.
Proper handling of this data can help your company gain opportunities to make the best business decisions. In an enterprise database farm, you need to have the proper tools to analyze data within the farm. You need determine instances or servers which has been over provisioned or under provisioned with resources, identify CPU and memory utilization of each server.
dbWatch is an enterprise monitoring and management solution that helps you keep track of your overall server utilization and keeps track of instances that are over or underutilized.
This will help you and your management decide whether to purchase, consolidate or maybe re-provision some resources to servers that needs more power which leads to cost savings, because you don’t need to buy expensive resources if you can just consolidate resources that are rarely used.
Having this overview, especially when you are managing a large number of database instances within your enterprise, helps you have full control of your database farm. It will help you make better decisions when doing your server consolidation. Instead of buying new hardware resources, you can easily save money by re-purposing some excess resources available.
Task Automation
Working as a DBA (Database Administrator) or developer we always find a way to make tasks simpler and easier; focusing on automating tasks that we work on daily.
When managing a database farm with a large number of instances you cannot simply execute your maintenance scripts manually for each database. When monitoring that number of instances, it is very inefficient to log in remote and manually connect on each server just to check the performance, status, running jobs of each instance.
Here you can see that key indicators – Number of Database (DB) Checked, Number of index rebuild/reorganize, disk space before rebuilding, disk space after rebuilding, total reduction size.
Database licensing and feature usage
dbWatch can keep track of the Oracle licensing within each instance, show all Oracle features enabled within the instance and display information if an option being used has an extra cost.
The screenshot shows a report generated in dbWatch along with Oracle component features being used within the instance.
