IT Infrastructure Cost Savings

IT infrastructure supports applications built to offer end-user business functionality, and databases are a form of infrastructure. Costs related to your overall infrastructure include various database costs, including purchasing, monitoring, and maintenance costs.

IT infrastructure includes databases and other elements, including server, storage, and network infrastructure. Infrastructure can support applications that allow employees, customers, and other end users to access or engage with these same resources. Having the right type and sufficient amount of infrastructure resources is important for supporting services—while inefficiencies can cause higher costs than necessary.

Infrastructure and database costs can also be related to the environment. Organizations can house their infrastructure and applications on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment with elements of both. There are advantages and IT infrastructure costs associated with each approach, but both specific needs and budget should determine this choice.

No matter where the infrastructure and applications used are housed, database infrastructure administering should also include monitoring and managing both infrastructure and databases performance to guarantee the availability and health of the systems, a process that can also add on extra costs, especially if problems arise.

While infrastructure and database monitoring and maintenance can add costs, it’s also critical for keeping other associated costs as low as possible, so you can fix problems quickly rather than over-purchasing resources or losing valuable business time due to downtime. Improving your problem resolution times often requires advanced tools that offer visibility into the performance of individual applications and other network components, with the end goal of ensuring infrastructure and database cost savings.

Several factors influence database costs, but some of the foundational costs are related to purchasing and database optimization.

Whether you decide to purchase or rent your infrastructure, equipment and resources can have a significant impact on your IT infrastructure cost breakdown, as these two options have very different pricing structures. Purchasing equipment increases your upfront IT infrastructure costs, after which you’re responsible for maintenance and upkeep costs, for instance, whereas renting allows you to offload those fees and risks to a third party for a monthly charge included in your cloud database costs.

Unoptimized databases are another significant contributor to database-related expenses. The process of optimizing your databases helps ensure you’re not over-provisioning infrastructure equipment and eases strain on your resources. By optimizing, you can save on database costs by renting fewer resources in the cloud, or, alternatively, by not purchasing more hardware for a malfunctioning database.

Other factors affecting your database infrastructure costs include development, support, maintenance, contingency plans, and backup solutions.

An efficient way to detect and avoid unnecessary IT infrastructure costs is to use a software solution built to provide an IT infrastructure cost breakdown alongside database infrastructure administering insights.

Tools can help reduce software and database infrastructure maintenance costs, while improving opportunities for faster and more effective collaboration between team members when solving problems. They can also help simplify your database infrastructure administering processes by using automation—streamlining time-consuming or error-prone tasks, minimizing disruptions, and giving your staff more time to attend to more pressing issues or initiatives.

Comprehensive and sophisticated network monitoring tools help point your team toward the root cause of issues and minimize the amount of time and money you’re devoting to database infrastructure maintenance. One useful tool feature is machine learning that provides adaptive fault detection related to your typical system behavior patterns. You gain insight into problems preventing work from being completing and can in turn affect performance or even business productivity. Faster insight into these anomalies means you can more easily address the root cause and prevent costly downtime. 

Overall, tool-based insights help improve your ability to monitor, manage, and understand the relationship between database infrastructure costs and their effect on the business at large.

SolarWinds Database Observability offers capabilities to help you gain insight into database and infrastructure performance and costs, including anomaly detection, metrics reporting, shareable dashboards, and more. The following are some of the key in-depth features you can use to monitor costs more effectively.

The monitoring capabilities of Database Observability are built to be even more granular, monitoring your database instances andances but also automatically comparing captured MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other queries against rules and checks for optimal query-writing practices. Any queries that fail these rule checks are also shown on the Best Practices page. If you enable query samples, Database Observability monitors your instances for opportunities to optimize your queries and indexes and can proactively alert you when any are detected. Additionally, Database Observability is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, which can benefit the bottom line of your IT infrastructure cost breakdown.

Managing and optimizing database costs go a long way in supporting business goals, such as increasing revenue and optimizing or reducing current operating costs. Optimizing applications to increase speed and performance can improve the end-user experience and result in fewer troubleshooting requests as well. Database Observability also helps to reduce costs by consolidating multiple tools into a single platform, simplifying database infrastructure performance monitoring processes and providing consolidated views of the insights you care about. 

Additionally, Database Observability is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, which can benefit the bottom line of your IT infrastructure cost breakdown.