Let’s not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience this familiar cycle. This is not a bad thing! It’s a normal thing. Databases are easy to start with and do an excellent job of holding important data. There are many variations of this story and many ways to manage and deal with the growth, from caching to read replicas to sharding to separation of different types of data and so on.

We are pleased to introduce support for Microsoft SQL Server as part of our generally available Metricbeat modules to capture database metrics. Microsoft SQL Server has been a popular and successful SQL database over the years, and we are really excited about this new addition to the Metricbeat family.

Azure SQL enables you to maintain the security, integrity and consistency of your data, which is critical when customer information is at stake, but it requires using a new approach to security. In Azure, you can have your SQL Server workloads running in a hosted infrastructure (IaaS) or running as a hosted service (PaaS). Within PaaS, you have multiple deployment options and service tiers within each deployment option.

Databases are a fundamental keystone of most applications, and there are many options for many different use cases. Even a single database can be used in a variety of ways, but regardless of the database type, implementation, or use case, the need for a good solution for monitoring them remains a common denominator. Databases keep the most precious information of any company, and any hiccup can be a reason for alarm.

MongoDB Atlas is a fully managed NoSQL database that deploys onto the cloud platform of your choice: AWS, Azure, or GCP. Atlas provides built-in security features and automatically distributes clusters across availability zones to help ensure high availability and uptime. We’re excited to announce that with our new integration, you can now monitor MongoDB Atlas health and performance metrics alongside the rest of your cloud infrastructure and the applications that depend on your database.

Oracle database availability and performance is key. Gain insight into what happens within your Oracle environment. Using the NiCE Oracle Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM, advanced monitoring has never been easier. The NiCE Oracle Management Pack smart algorithm determines problems and their severity way upfront. Leverage your existing investment, reduce costs, save time and build efficiencies that will last beyond your expectations.

With Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa it is possible to write your own features to provide custom functionality to your users. These additional features are called skill, and there are tens of thousands available in the Alexa Skill Store.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that allows you to easily scale to huge numbers of records with single digit millisecond performance. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor DynamoDB and what is important to watch.