Database Performance

Monitoring Explored
and Explained
Ed Tittel

CONTENTS IN THIS PAPER

Improving Database Performance  2 Database performance monitoring seeks to provide 24/7 database

Digging Into Database Health  3

health metrics and visibility into database queries and code, with


access to details from inside the database engine and from the host
Addressing Database Performance 3 operating system (OS) perspective. This provides numerous benefits,

Improving Database Efficiency  4

including the following:


• Past performance and behavior inform current observations
Measuring Code Deployment Impact 4
• Developers and DBAs iterate on code and query changes for contin-


Meet SolarWinds Database uous improvement and optimization
Performance Monitor 5
• Drive capacity and growth planning using statistical inferences and
projections

• Pinpoint and address performance and resource issues directly and

expeditiously

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Because data drives business success, anything organi-
zations can do to speed up troubleshooting for database
problems is pure gold. Time saved in solving problems
more quickly or delivering faster, more reliable access
to data boosts productivity and profitability. Continuous
database performance monitoring helps organizations
surmount troubleshooting hurdles and get more done.
This is more important than ever, as data is being cre-
ated at a phenomenal rate—1.145 trillion MB per day. IDC
estimates this daily number will grow to 463 exabytes by
2025 (a multiplier of just over 404,000 in just four years,
for a CAGR of 2421%). Exponential growth like this intro-
duces massive complexity.
It also changes how we must design, manage, and mon-
itor databases storing such data. Furthermore, proper
database management is an essential part of doing busi-
ness and helps ensure organizations can meet and exceed
end-user expectations and in-house requirements.
Thus, it all comes down to maximizing and optimizing
database performance.
Proper database management
is an essential part of doing
business and helps ensure
organizations can meet and
exceed end-user expectations
and in-house requirements.
Database performance monitoring also provides objective
metrics permitting organizations to evaluate the perfor-
mance and resource impact of code changes to database
applications and queries. Ultimately, this means more
efficient and effective use of data and a more profitable
and productive organization. It also means extending the
purview of database performance management into the
cloud and across all database instances in use, no matter
where they reside.
In particular, database performance monitoring zeroes in
on database queries. It’s able to illuminate their comple-
tion times, identify factors contributing to latency, and
detail their resource consumption (including compute,
DATA BAS E P ER FO R M A N CE MO N I TO R I N G E X PLORE D A ND E XPLA INE D
storage, and networking). These insights add consider-
able power to a company’s ability to create more efficient
databases and improve existing database usage.
Database performance monitoring provides a histori-
cal view of data so past performance and behavior can
continuously inform current observations. This same
historical view also supports trend analysis, growth and
capacity planning, and ready identification of outlier
values potentially indicating performance, reliability, or
availability problems.
Improving Database Performance
The deep and comprehensive visualization provided by a
top-shelf database performance monitoring tool forms
a strong foundation for optimization, improvement, and
problem-solving. An adaptive fault detection facility can
uncover previously unseen interruptions in the database
server or in database server availability. Given the right
such tool, IT staff can pinpoint something like a MySQL
server stall fault, along with host ID on which the data-
base is running, its time of occurrence, duration, and so
forth. Various details for such a fault appear in Figure 1.
In a similar fashion, DBAs, IT staff, and developers
can use a well-built database performance monitor-
ing tool to take them deep into database performance
details and data.
Fault Info
Category: MySQL Server Stall Fault
Host: aps1
Time: 11:05:17 AM Dec 12, 2020
Duration: 18
Severity: 12.5
Figure 1: Details for a MySQL server stall fault
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Digging Into Database Health about where and how to change server configurations.
Additionally, it can identify badly behaved queries
Database performance monitoring also provides 24/7
through its process list and other “top offender” or “top
real-time visibility into database health based on cur-
consumer” tracking tools.
rent measurements and metrics in light of prior perfor-
mance and best/average/worst-case comparisons. This
drives ongoing insights capable of spurring performance Addressing Database
improvements based on query tweaks, design optimiza- Performance
tions, and code changes.
To help organizations address database performance
Furthermore, a good database performance monitor
issues, a good database performance monitor lets users
helps simplify and streamline ongoing checkups with
track and plot metrics over time. It can illuminate trends
flexible, built-in tools (such as custom scripts for gather-
and changes within its health summaries for database
ing performance metrics) and expert recommendations.
instances and the systems hosting them. Figure 2, for
Better still, such software can uncover issues or ineffi-
example, shows the break-down for how MongoDB pro-
ciencies and offer remediations or improvements.
cessing time is split across multiple concurrent activities
Overall, a well-built database performance monitoring and clearly indicates that query processing is consuming
tool also helps organizations track and converge on key an overwhelming share of compute resources.
performance indicator (KPI) goals. These include targets
In addition, a well-built database performance monitor
for availability, latency, user experience metrics, and
can make recommendations based on best practices. This
improved mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to
helps organizations with key activities such as database
recover (MTTR) metrics.
and query optimization. Ongoing recommendations help
From an operations standpoint, a good database per- organizations keep improving their performance and
formance monitoring tool can make recommendations reliability constantly and continuously.

Figure 2: In this snapshot of current operations in MongoDB, query processing significantly outweighs other ongoing activities

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A good database performance monitor usually incor- and analyze trends and seasonal or periodic peaks and
porates tools to identify and investigate performance troughs in resource consumption and utilization. Thus,
outliers. By offering snapshots of current operations for a high-quality, high-capability database performance
a database platform like MongoDB, it can visually report monitor gives teams the insight and visibility into data
that query processing swamps other ongoing operations they need to successfully manage database performance.
by several orders of magnitude. Such displays point data-
base professionals directly where further investigation Measuring Code
and optimization are likely to lead to big payoffs.
Deployment Impact
In similar fashion, a good database performance monitor
In the same vein, developers, QA and DevOps teams, and
helps organizations measure resource capacity for data-
DBAs can use a well-built database performance moni-
base instances and the hosts on which they run. Then,
tor to see the impacts of new code on database workload
organizations can use those metrics to manage capacity
and query response prior to production deployment.
and match resource demand and supply. Thus, they can
Team members can compare query responses and overall
make sure applications and servers are properly provi-
database and application performance before and after
sioned to prevent or mitigate resource-based bottlenecks.
code changes to understand what’s helping and what’s
making things worse and iteratively run experiments to
Improving Database Efficiency improve outcomes.
DBAs, developers, and QA and DevOps staff can use a good
database performance monitor to visualize impact and
The deep and comprehensive
runtime for upcoming changes. Typical code tools might
include visual performance analysis, deep SQL parsing, visualization provided
and execution plan analytics. All such facilities combine by a top-shelf database
to help teams understand and optimize changes to exist-
performance monitoring tool
ing code and queries as well as new rollouts. Ultimately,
this leads DBAs and appli­cation teams (including DevOps forms a strong foundation for
staff) to keep databases healthy and proactively antic- optimization, improvement, and
ipate and forestall problems or issues. Clear objective
problem-solving.
metrics and observations help organizations achieve
better outcomes based on proven results.
DevOps and IT staff can use such a database performance
Careful attention to historical performance data in light monitor to compare top query performance over time
of current observations also helps database teams. They to drive toward continuous improvement. They can also
can more quickly identify events, problems, or incidents. find new queries with minimal effort (two clicks) so they
In the same vein, these teams can detect outliers or can easily zero in on items in need of analysis and pos-
anomalies before they escalate into noticeable delays or sible optimization. At any point, they can examine query
observable performance problems. details and performance, including sample results and
execution plans to determine what’s happening at run
Above all else, a well-built database performance mon-
time. Team members can spot events and trends this way
itor indefinitely maintains high-granularity historical
and steer development toward more optimal and effi-
data for purposes of comparison and low-granularity
cient implementations. The same holds true when code
data (which may be collected as often as every second)
and queries make the transition from test to production.
for more than a year. This lets users zoom into any point
in the historical record to gather observations driving
capacity planning, assure scalability as growth occurs,

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Meet SolarWinds Database
Performance Monitor
SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor is a soft-
®
ware as a service (SaaS)-based platform for monitoring
traditional, open-source, and cloud-native databases.
SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor offers a web-
based UI accessible on any internet-connected device,
and it works with all the well-known traditional, open-
source, and cloud-native databases, including NoSQL,
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and more. Because it’s
cloud-based itself, this tool can monitor open-source
databases running anywhere, whether they’re on-prem-
ises, in the cloud, or in hybrid instances across multiple
runtime environments.
SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor makes
both real-time and historical data available to its users,
backed up by its own compute, storage, and networking
resources. Thus, using this kind of database performance
monitoring imposes low overhead on databases in oper-
ation. It collects data the databases make available con-
stantly and routinely, but it uses its own resources for
its built-in analysis, history, and reporting capabilities
without consuming database resources.
DevOps and IT staff can use a
well-built database performance
monitor to compare top query
performance over time to drive
toward continuous improvement.
An inside-out and outside-in perspective enables truly
comprehensive database performance monitoring, which
puts applications and queries into perspective within
their host systems and the general database instances
inside which they run. Such metrics help distinguish the
performance of applications and queries from other,
similar queries and applications, and it also helps dis-
tinguish supporting services such as replication, backup,
and load balancing.
A lesser-known advantage of database performance
monitoring is it promotes infrastructure cost savings.
This is because it allows organizations to pinpoint and
remedy specific causes for performance issues. They
need no longer “throw hardware at the problem” to solve
their performance issues when more focused and precise
remediation is readily available from the performance
analysis tools and recommendations database perfor-
mance monitoring puts at their fingertips.
GET STARTED TODAY
SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor is just
the kind of database performance monitoring tool set
modern, forward-thinking organizations need. Please
visit the SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
homepage, where you can request a demo or start a
free trial.

This explains how SolarWinds Database Performance

Monitor makes current snapshots available alongside
historical data. It also explains how the tool provides
24/7 real-time database health monitoring, includ-
ing both internal database metrics and system metrics
from the operating systems inside which the database
instances run.

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