What Is Database Monitoring?

• Database Monitoring Definition

  Database Monitoring Definition

  Database monitoring offers the ability to gather essential database performance metrics to help optimize and tune database processes for high performance.
• Impact of database performance on system and application performance

  Impact of database performance on system and application performance

  Database performance is essential in maintaining the performance of a system or application. In many cases, a slow-performing application or unresponsive system indicates an underlying issue with the database performance.

  Database performance issues can result from inefficiently coded SQL statements, flawed database structure, or suboptimal application code reliant on the database.

  Sometimes, small inefficiencies accrued due to changes over time can also cause poor performance. This emphasizes the need to improve database performance continually.

  Generally, bad database performance can affect an organization’s IT in two ways:

  1. Application performance: Business applications rely on a database system to perform online transaction processing, including orders, invoices, payroll, and other processing needs. An underperforming database leads to slower or no application response, which leads to bad user experience, loss of valuable productivity hours, and suboptimal revenue generation.
  2. System outages: When a database becomes unreliable and responds too slowly, it can result in system outages. This completely disrupts business processes relying on it.
• Monitoring to identify tuning and optimization opportunities

  Monitoring to identify tuning and optimization opportunities

  Database monitoring can help you identify performance issues proactively and find optimization opportunities. Using this information, database administrators can tune a database for improved performance and responsiveness.

  Typically, database performance depends on four factors:

  1. Workload: This is the amount of activity a database system needs to perform, including batch processing, transaction processing, and administrative activity. The amount of workload can vary depending on the business needs and may become unpredictable when application traffic spikes unexpectedly.
  2. Resources: A database relies on multiple hardware and software resources to perform various functions. Such resources include CPU, I/O capacity, memory, disk space, among others. The availability and performance of these underlying resources can affect the overall database performance.
  3. Optimization: Database performance relies on well-optimized queries. An inefficiently formulated query can make a database system perform poorly and consume more resources than required ideally. Other optimizations at the hardware and software level also influence database performance.
  4. Contention: This occurs when two or more actions—like an update or delete request—concurrently try to manipulate the same data record or use the same resource. This delays executing the action and results in reduced throughput, limiting the ability of the database to process more data or transactions.
• Main differences in proactive and reactive approaches to database monitoring

  Main differences in proactive and reactive approaches to database monitoring

  Proactive monitoring helps identify issues before they affect end users or applications in an organization. It’s primarily focused on detecting performance abnormalities and utilization trends of the database.

  Proactive monitoring collects data from multiple sources that affect and depend on database performance. This can include OS logs, database logs, application performance metrics, etc. The collected data is processed using anomaly detection algorithms and machine learning algorithms to identify and predict performance problems. Accordingly, proactive monitoring helps database administrators take preventative steps.

  On the other hand, reactive monitoring focuses on reporting problems affecting end-user or system performance in real time. Generally, it gives a real-time view of the database performance as it is happening. This monitoring technique is usually less resource intensive.

  With reactive monitoring, database administrators can only address observable performance issues already affecting end users.

  Ideally, an organization should rely on proactive and reactive monitoring techniques to leverage the benefits and gain more in-depth performance insights. In addition, regularly conducting a database performance test is essential to assess performance.