The IoT, Internet of Things, has arrived. Sensors are everywhere, collecting more and more data about us and the world around us. Temperature, Humidity, Fluid Levels, Traffic counts, the status of devices and things like doors and elevators are being collected and distributed all around us. The question now is "What do we do with all that data?
Traditionally, DBAs are the ones primarily tasked with maintaining high availability and peak performance of the database environment. Therefore, they assume the responsibility of evaluating Performance Monitoring solutions. This requires identifying the diagnostics needs specific to the environment. With the *DevOps workflow becoming more popular, DBAs and Developers are finding it to be mutually beneficial to find efficient ways to proactively address database performance.
What has become a typical theme in the arena of Information Technology are the concerns around managing costs associated with these systems. Whether it be the capital and operating expenditures associated with the data center, or the ongoing costs associated with everyday management and maintenance, most organizations want better control over what seems to be an ever-growing IT budget.
If you missed the recent webcast on SQL performance tuning presented by Janis Griffin, you are definitely going to want to watch it on-demand. She packed so much information into 60 minutes, it’s a wonder there weren’t thousands of heads exploding across WebEx – and every nugget of advice was pure gold. Let’s start with Janis’ 30+ year career as a DBA across multiple platforms, especially Oracle and SQL Server. She knows her stuff and knows how to talk about it.
We were recently asked if Foglight can be used to monitor Google Cloud SQL instances, specifically MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. To clarify, these are the PaaS (or DBaaS) offerings from Google. Within Google Cloud Platform, you can use Compute Engine virtual machines and monitor the databases and OS's on those like you normally would with Foglight. The answer from our testing is that it "more-or-less" works.. This is not an official support endorsement however. That remains TBD.
We haven't added voice command to Foglight yet, but we can still get Foglight to play some tunes. I setup a small monitoring environment with a Foglight Management Server in a public cloud. I put a local Foglight Agent Manager on my laptop to talk to it, and deployed the Windows agent to monitor it. I immediately got Memory Utilization alarms.
Foglight has a robust rules engine for alerting and notification. It's often the case that you can get to the same end zone in Foglight by many different plays. Using the Service Builder is an easy way to group "things" together. "Things" can be higher level objects like database instances or hosts, or very detailed objects like a set of disks or jobs that match a pattern.
Creating your own dashboard in Foglight is as easy as putting up the Festivus pole. In this post, a service containing all MySQL instances was created. A great feature of Foglight is the ability to create your own custom dashboards and reports. Expand the right-hand panel, and select Create dashboard. I normally start with "Use All Data."
We’re excited to announce the general availability of a brand new product: Foglight Container Management – Part of the Foglight for Performance Management suite. oglight Container Management provides real-time and historical analytics of containers and their hosts, across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It identifies performance bottlenecks, failed containers and issues within the orchestration layer.
Many things can happen if the database runs out of disk space. None of them are good. DBAs understand that it is essential to monitor database disk space so that critical business processes are uninterrupted. Quest’s Foglight provides peace of mind by monitoring that space and alerting on the threshold well in advance of potential space issues.
