In this video, you will learn how SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer or DPA for short, can be easily deployed on Amazon® Web Services, to monitor both RDS®and EC2® database servers. In addition, you will see how to identify and resolve database performance issues having the largest impact on your applications.
To deploy DPA in the cloud, simply go to the Amazon marketplace and search for SolarWinds. Click on 'Continue' to deploy the AMI. Once deployed, all the additional configurations are completed through the web browser interface.
The next step will be to register your database instances to be monitored by clicking on 'Register DB Instance for Monitoring.' In this case, we have already registered an instance.
Let's look at DPA to find and isolate a performance problem. A customer has just called in and complained of slowness in their order entry application. To troubleshoot, first log into DPA and review the main dashboard. This will give us a high-level overview of what is happening in our environment. It’s interesting that the order entry database (PRODOE-RDS) is showing several alarms.
Let's take a closer look by drilling into that database. From the trend screen, first look to the Advice tab for any critical or warning statuses.
The top 2 SQL statements which are in a critical state are especially interesting. For the first statement, the adviser is telling us that there are high amounts of blocking for this insert statement on January 20th. By drilling into that day in the trend screen, we can see a 24-hour view of the top 15 SQL statements.
For our insert statement, we can quickly see that it has been running every hour with a huge spike beginning in the 9:00 am hour. By drilling into that hour, we can view the blockers tab to see who is blocking this SQL statement. Here we can see that process ID of 83 has actually been blocking many other sessions for a long time. Each of these processes have spent over half an hour trying to run this insert statement.
Look at the blocker details, we can quickly identify the user and see that they were performing an update to the same table. Now we can begin work on resolving this issue.
Let's look at the tuning advice for our second SQL statement in Alarm. In this case, click on the 'More' link to see all of the details about the query and then review the execution plan. Notice that the adviser is suggesting several new indexes. At this point, we can decide to create and test them to see if they help improve performance.
To maximize the value that DPA delivers, 24x7 monitoring is recommended. As DPA continues to monitor and collect data, the more comprehensive the analysis becomes especially when identifying trends and anomalies over time. One surprise that many of our customers have learned, is that it's not always the best idea or cost-effective to provision large database servers in the cloud.
Instead, start with a small or medium-sized installation, use DPA to monitor performance, then add more resources when you need to.
Test drive DPA today, just visit www.solarwinds.com/dpa.