Still Looking for a Machine That Unleashes the Power in Your Database Instances?

If you are a frequent reader of database-related blogs, you have probably heard about the Severalnines blog. Well, we mean, you are reading it right now, aren’t you?

And if you’re reading the Severalnines blog, you probably already know a thing or two about products developed by Severalnines: obviously, the flagship product is ClusterControl, but we also have a couple of other things, such as CCX, and Backup Ninja as well! A while ago we have written a blog on the CCX blog titled “Are You Looking for a Machine That Unleashes the Power In Your Database Instances?” where we have told you how you should go about using one of the tools developed by the team over at Severalnines – CCX – to achieve your database monitoring and backup goals. This blog will be a little different, but still a little similar: this time, we will tell you how you can use ClusterControl developed by Severalnines to turn it into a machine that solves your database problems as well.

Why ClusterControl?

Before telling you how you should use the product developed by Severalnines to solve your database-related problems, we should probably tell you why should you use it in the first place.

You see, ClusterControl is developed by the database experts over at Severalnines. Severalnines is primarily consisted of former MySQL staff, but we have other database experts (for example, MongoDB) on board as well which means that you can be sure that the tools developed by the team will be in the best quality possible. Don’t believe us? Check out our customer list: the Severalnines support team takes care of all kinds of issues across a very wide variety of industries: is your company in the healthcare business? ClusterControl can help. Are you a dean of a university faculty and find that your faculty needs to solve some issues relevant to database automation? ClusterControl can help as well (we mean, we have University of Antwerp in our customer list, they didn’t go wrong when choosing us as their trusted database partner, why should you?), we even have AVG (yes, the anti-virus company) on board: all of those companies entrust their most critical database infrastructure to Severalnines, and after you have read this blog post, we are sure that you will be confident enough to add your company to the list!

What ClusterControl Can Do For Me?

“Alright”, – we hear you saying. “I do know what your tool does and who uses it, but what’s in it for me? Why should I use ClusterControl instead of using a tool X developed by some company that may be close to the location of my company?” We are glad you ask that. Here are some key reasons you should consider using ClusterControl and adding ClusterControl to the list of your trusted database advisors:

• ClusterControl can, of course, help with the monitoring of your database instances. We mean, launch your installation of ClusterControl, log in, and you will see a whole new world of database monitoring open right in front of your eyes – impressive, right?

  

  In this case (on the main page), you will see that ClusterControl will provide you with the details (overview) of what’s happening inside of your database clusters: you will instantly see the load of each one of your database servers that you are monitoring, you will see the amounts of connections, selects, updates, deletes, inserts and overall queries per second, you will also be able to observe the topology of your database cluster and other things. Perhaps it all sounds very complex, but don’t fret – with ClusterControl on your hands, your database instances will achieve performance at the levels you only dream of. How? Read further..

• ClusterControl, among other things, also comes with a top-notch query monitoring system that depicts how your queries are doing too – we hope that your team were monitoring the queries inside of your database instances, didn’t you all? Even if not, no worries here as well:

  

  ClusterControl is also able to depict top slow and long-running queries allowing you to see what query on what database is running, what rows it’s sending and examining, what’s happening with your temporary tables, what is the execution speed of your queries (the execution speed is also split into three different parts including the max speed and average speed as you can see), ClusterControl’s query monitor also lets you see the amount and contents of current database connections and query outliers (queries deviating more than 2 sigmas from the normal response time.) Again, it all may sound very complex, but don’t fret: as already mentioned before, ClusterControl will let you see all of the queries that interact with your database instances, and you will, of course, be able to kill all of the processes that you desire to kill. For example, notice that a particular query is hogging resources? Alright, head over to ClusterControl and kill it! Wow, that was easy, wasn’t it?

• In order to fully unleash the power hidden inside of your database instances, sometimes you might need some database-related advice. What do you do? You turn to your trusted colleagues – DBAs.. Yes? Well, sometimes.. Not until you have used ClusterControl! Leave DBAs alone and use ClusterControl instead: ClusterControl has a specialized Advisors section too!

  

  Advisors have multiple categories – advisors specific to Severalnines, MySQL advisors, security advisors, schema advisors, replication and performance advisors, even some advisors relevant to the storage engines of your MySQL instances! (InnoDB) – and that’s not even it… Advisors can be edited (for that, you would need some javascript-ish knowledge or disabled as well.) for example, here’s how the code of one of the advisors looks like: impressive, yeah?

  

  You can even select others on the left hand side – see how it all starts to work together so nicely, yeah?
  Advisors, in a nutshell, provide advice that will certainly help you improve your database performance: choose what kind of advisor you want to work with (you can choose from categories as already previously mentioned), then enable or disable one of them – that’s it – that’s just as much as it takes. You should be done! Advisors should be running properly.

• Notice that your database instances are slow? You might want to take a look at your schema as well. For that, ClusterControl also has a Schema Analyzer that depicts MyISAM tables, indexes that are redundant, or tables without primary keys, etc.:

  

  Yes, that means that ClusterControl developed by Severalnines also lets you take a look into tables that you did some work on in the past (e.g. added indexes on): to make sure that your indexes are added properly and your indexes are actually helping you unleash the full power inside of your database instances, keep an eye on the Schema Analyzer as well.

• Want to unleash the power of your database backups (e.g. take them automatically or monitor them) as well? ClusterControl lets you do that too!

  

  ClusterControl, in this case, can help you create a backup, restore your backup or schedule one as well. For example, here’s how the backup restoration window should look like:
   

  

   

• ClusterControl can do so much more! And yes, it takes care of the security of your database instances too:
   

  

As you can see, ClusterControl can do a lot of things that help you unleash the entire power of your database instances: take a look into its functionality, and see how the tool developed by Severalnines can help you take your databases to the next level! Once you have taken a look, stick around the blog since we have more things prepared for you: see you in the next blog!