Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Assessing the cost of a database monitoring tool isn't always straightforward. The quick reaction is to solely assess costs on a license-for-license basis.

Dedicated vector databases have become such a standard part of the RAG conversation that teams often add one before they have proved they need it. According to studies, over 70% of companies using LLMs are using vector databases and RAG to customize their models. That shows how quickly the pattern has become normal. However, it does not mean every RAG application needs a separate retrieval system. If your application already runs on PostgreSQL, pgvector may be enough.

If your company relies on multiple databases and applications, keeping track of database performance can become difficult. You may face challenges such as: As your database environment grows, identifying the cause of performance issues becomes harder without the right monitoring in place. I get why database monitoring tools have become an important part of managing database performance. They help you monitor database activity, spot performance issues, and find what is causing a slowdown.

At incident.io we are huge fans of Postgres; we've written about it a lot over the years, including how to choose the right indexes and how we're proud of being boring (The Pet Shop Boys). We use Postgres as our primary transactional database, which as of today has ~900 tables, and counting! The vast majority of our codebase does something along the following lines: read some data from Postgres, execute some business logic, then write that data back to Postgres. It is not, however, always that simple.

Imagine this: you are testing the performance of some part of your application. Everything is going smoothly, the numbers look good, and as a last check you turn on Go’s race detector. Then, out of nowhere, it prints a warning you didn’t expect: So you look at it. You look at it again, and again, and you think: “What the…?” The race is between your code and a goroutine you never started, somewhere deep inside net/http. You have no idea how that is possible, or why.

The first PostgreSQL post ran on a laptop: a demo app, a Docker container, and the proxymock CLI. That is the fastest way to see the idea. It is also not where your database problems live. Your real query mix lives in the cluster, where a Java service with a connection pool, an ORM and a schema migration tool sends the statements nobody wrote by hand. This post deploys an open source banking app to Kubernetes and records the queries one of its services sends to PostgreSQL.

I’m not the one whose phone lights up at 3 a.m. when production breaks. But I’ve spent years working alongside the engineers who are, and I’ve noticed that observability migrations happen for two reasons. Either engineering needed one, or, far more often, a quote landed that looked too good to refuse. The engineers rarely regret the first kind. The second kind they tell me about in year two, usually with a renewal notice in hand.