24/7 Real-Time Database Health Monitoring

A big part of checking database health is monitoring key metrics to better understand issues that could impact database health. Some of the most important server metrics related to database health to monitor include:

• Transactions – Monitoring transactions can offer a reflective measurement of database performance, as identifying long running or blocked transactions can help you better understand the potential effect on response time and causes of deadlocks.
• Query performance – Poor query performance can impact database performance. Some specific issues to look for in your queries are deadlocks, too many or too few indexes, and queries selecting more data than necessary.
• Capacity – Some issues with database performance may also be due to capacity issues. These include insufficient or slow CPU, slow disk without sufficient IOPS, misconfigured or full disks, and lack of memory.
• Configuration – Checking your configurations against best practices can help you make sure the settings aren’t affecting database performance.

When it comes to understanding database health, it’s also important to consider which database type you’re using and picking the right health monitoring approach for that specific database. For example, a NoSQL database (which is not relational) may need a different database health check than a relational database like SQL.

Making a database available 24/7 depends on first knowing what contributes to database availability, so you can monitor key statistics and address issues before they can significantly affect availability.

A database is defined as being available if users of the data—including applications, customers, and employees—can readily access the data they need. Database availability can also be defined by the percentage of time the database can be used for productive work.

At least four main elements make up database availability:

• Manageability: The power to create and maintain an environment that effectively delivers service to users. 
• Reliability: The power to deliver specified levels of service for a certain period. 
• Recoverability: The power to reestablish service in case of an error or failure.
• Serviceability: The power to identify, diagnose, and resolve database availability issues when they arise.

Depending on the type of database you’re working with, there are a few different ways to make a database available 24/7. One of the best ways is to continuously monitor your database health, so you can more quickly identify and resolve issues that arise.

SolarWinds Database Observability is a SaaS application built on the SolarWinds Observability SaaS solution built to help you more easily maintain and improve the health of traditional, open-source, and cloud-native databases at scale and without overhead.

Database Observability is designed to continuously collect, display, and alert on essential database metrics that can indicate an issue with database health and performance. The tool can also display important database metrics in customizable views that can be easily shared to better enable cross-functional team workflows.

Database Observability features a fault detection algorithm built to detect when requests for work stall, so you can more easily detect and resolve what’s causing the faults to prevent interruptions to database availability and database health issues before they become outages.