Webinar Replay: How to Measure Database Availability

Watch the replay of Part 2 of our database high availability webinar special!

Thanks to to everyone who participated in this week’s webinar on how to measure database availability. The replay and slides are now available to view online.

It is notoriously hard to measure and report on, although it is an important KPI in any SLA between you and your customer. With that in mind, we will discuss the different factors that affect database availability and see how you can measure your database availability in a realistic way.

It is common enough to define availability in terms of 9s (e.g. 99.9% or 99.999%) – especially here at Severalnines – although there are often different opinions as to what these numbers actually mean, or how they are measured.

Is the database available if an instance is up and running, but it is unable to serve any requests? Or if response times are excessively long, so that users consider the service unusable? Is the impact of one longer outage the same as multiple shorter outages? How do partial outages affect database availability, where some users are unable to use the service while others are completely unaffected?

Not agreeing on precise definitions with your customers might lead to dissatisfaction. The database team might be reporting that they have met their availability goals, while the customer is dissatisfied with the service.

Join us for this webinar during which we will discuss the different factors that affect database availability and see how to measure database availability in a realistic way.

Watch the replay

Agenda

• Defining availability targets
  • Critical business functions
  • Customer needs
  • Duration and frequency of downtime
  • Planned vs unplanned downtime
  • SLA
• Measuring the database availability
  • Failover/Switchover time
  • Recovery time
  • Upgrade time
  • Queries latency
  • Restoration time from backup
  • Service outage time
• Instrumentation and tools to measure database availability:
  • Free & open-source tools
  • CC’s Operational Report
  • Paid tools

Watch the replay

Speaker

Bartlomiej Oles is a former Support Engineer for Severalnines. He is a MySQL and Oracle DBA, with over 15 years experience in managing highly available production systems at IBM, Nordea Bank, Acxiom, Lufthansa, and other Fortune 500 companies. In the past five years, his focus has been on building and applying automation tools to manage multi-datacenter database environments.