What Monitoring Tool Do You Use To Keep An Eye On Your Database Clusters?

Choosing a monitoring tool that helps you keep an eye out on your database clusters might not be a very easy task. At least not until you know what you need out of it and what your options are. The majority of DBAs and software developers might think that they do not need one to begin with, but when they start working, the reality might be a little different.

Different monitoring tools usually offer different and sometimes really diverse sets of options: some monitoring tools might help you improve your database performance by simply advising you what to do once your queries slow down, while others act as fully-fledged database performance improving machines that help you improve your database performance no matter what you’d do. For example, ClusterControl developed by the known database experts over at Severalnines can help you manage your backups, monitor the performance of your queries and alert you once things go wrong, help you deploy and scale fully managed and highly available database clusters, help you ensure that your databases stay compliant with any regulatory requirements, ClusterControl also comes with automated performance advisors that can always tell you how better to improve the performance of your open source databases: isn’t that amazing?

Choosing a Tool

However, as good as some tools might be, first you need to decide what would you ask from a monitoring tool in the first place: do you need it’s help to ensure high availability of your database instances? What about performance? Security? What do you ask for from the tool to make it “good enough” for use? Perfect for use? Answer some of these questions and you will know whether you need a monitoring tool or not:

• Is the manual monitoring of your database instances getting more and more tedious?

• Do your employees complain about slow database performance?

• Have you ever had (or do you now have) any issues with failed database clusters?

• Have you ever wanted to automate the backup processes relevant to your database instances? Restore them automatically?

If you have answered “yes” to at least some of these questions, there’s a good chance you might benefit from a monitoring tool. However, monitoring tools these days are offered left and right, and it might be really hard to decide exactly what kind of monitoring tool you or your company needs. What do you do then? You would probably rely on how many people or companies trust the product already, wouldn’t you?

Don’t fret: there is a monitoring tool that will be useful to almost every company, from healthcare to software development, and that is developed by known database ninjas – ClusterControl. Here’s how it looks from the inside:

As you can see, first off you will see a bunch of database clusters. Clusters can have many different types: MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB and others. ClusterControl will help you deploy or import a database cluster into the system, and then, help you manage it. As you can see, ClusterControl will help you with a bunch of different things:

• It will help you observe the status of your database nodes:
   

  

   

• Their topology too:
   

  

   

• It will help you monitor the performance of your queries:
   

  

   

• It will even help you back up your data!

  
  As you can see, ClusterControl can help you create or restore backups, also see all of your scheduled backups as well. Isn’t that amazing?

• ClusterControl will also let you manage all of your database clusters under its hood, even showing you information relevant to the operating systems the database clusters are installed on!

  

  The cluster management part of ClusterControl will provide you with the ability to manage hosts, configurations, deploy and also import load balancers, have a glance over your database users and schemas, even create databases if such databases do not yet exist!
   

  

• ClusterControl also has a so-called “developer studio” that lets you manage the scripts relevant to the management of your database instances – simply navigate to the Manage tab and click on Developer Studio:

  

  Bear in mind that you should have at least some javascript knowledge to make these scripts work, but with that, you’re golden!

ClusterControl has many other features unique to itself, but we will leave that to you! Be sure to check it out today and explore all of its monitoring features that will surely help your business grow and help your databases outperform their competition.