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Datadog has recently announced the extended availability of Database Monitoring (DBM). Database Monitoring offers database administrators and engineers the visibility required to find and fix any issues related to application performance that came into existence due to slow running database queries.
It has been witnessed that the root cause of incidents and application performance issues are database queries. The entire database may face issues that result in performance degradation for all the applications using the database in case applications make unnecessary queries or fail to use indices.
Furthermore, it becomes highly difficult to understand the root cause of an issue and identify the trends as databases do not store any historical query performance metrics. This scenario pushes the engineers into thoroughly searching all the databases individually to investigate. As a conclusion, the process increases downtime and affects the customer experience.
Datadog Database Monitoring
Datadog Database Monitoring has been created on the existing ability of the product to monitor the general health and availability of the database and fundamental infrastructure by enabling the users to mark the exact queries that are impacting the user experience and the performance of the application.
Users can analyze the performance of database queries, keep a check on historical trends in query latencies and overhead, troubleshoot slow queries with detailed execution breakdowns with the help of DBM. Organizations also get to unlock improvements in the performance of databases, upstream applications, microservices, and APIs that are underpinned by the database.
Database Monitoring users have also got the ability to automatically correlate query performance data with Datadog infrastructure metrics in order to quickly identify resource bottlenecks. Engineers may easily understand whether the performance issues are at the database or infrastructure level with the DBM. They also don’t need to manually export and reconcile information from multiple disconnected point solutions. The unified model by Datadog would make it convenient to search and filter information at a scale that has the same tags used everywhere in Datadog.
Datadog DBM Benefits for organizations would include:
- Pinpoint the root cause of performance drops: One of the most important leverages that Datadog DBM provides is the ability to pinpoint the exact issue. The product offers quick access to explain plans so that the user can witness the step sequence used to make a query. This also allows the organization to localize bottlenecks and discover opportunities to optimize performance and resource efficiency.
- Offer access to database performance telemetry to engineers, without compromising data security: With DBM, the organization gets a centralized view of database performance data without the need for direct user access to database instances that get automatically correlated with infrastructure and application metrics.
- Quickly detect and isolate drops in performance: The organization will be able to track performance or normal queries over their entire fleet of databases. They can also see which types of queries are executed the most, where to run, and incur alerts for expensive or long-running queries. For every query, organizations can go directly to the hosts that are running that query, and get information related to log and network to understand the performance of the host.
- Ameliorate and maintain database health, minimizing incidents and saving costs: Database Monitoring allows organizations to keep the historical query performance data for up to three months, so they can understand changes over time and prevent regressions.
