Databases are at the center of virtually all business activity in today’s digital-centric world. A company’s ability to perform financial transactions, collect and manage customer data, analyze data to derive insights, and monitor production application performance relies heavily on its database. As the Database infrastructure grows in complexity with the transition to Hybrid On-Premises, Cloud, Hybrid environments, the ability for companies to effectively monitor how their database is performing has increased substantially.
Without proper database monitoring, a company can suffer from application downtime due to lack of knowledge about database performance and slow application performance. Additionally, the company could also become vulnerable to potential Security breaches and loss of revenues due to security incidents. Understanding these major challenges of monitoring databases is essential to any business looking to stay competitive in today’s marketplace by preserving the highest levels of performance, security, and scalability.
Managing the Increased Volume of Data
The rapid increase of data that businesses have to manage today has been, and continues to be, one of the major challenges of database monitoring. The business world now collects an unprecedented amount of structured and unstructured data through the use of the Internet, mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT), and enterprise systems. As large amounts of data continue to accumulate in databases, it will become increasingly challenging for teams to detect bottlenecks in database performance, and current database monitoring solutions cannot automatically scale as the size of the database grows.
Ways to Overcome This Challenge
Companies should implement scalable, cloud-based database monitoring solutions that can provide real-time visibility and monitoring of large amounts of data in their databases. In addition, companies that implement automated performance monitoring/tracking, intelligent alerting, and predictive analytics will have the capability to identify performance concerns before they become a problem for the end-user. This is especially valuable in large, distributed database environments, where companies maintain a centralized monitoring dashboard that shows real-time performance.
The Growing Complexity of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments
At this point in time, a large portion of U.S. businesses now operates a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture, which has made monitoring of databases hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and/or on-premise systems much more complex. Monitoring of databases that exist on multiple cloud platforms is complex due to the fact that each of these platforms utilizes different performance metrics, user interfaces, and behaviors, which makes it difficult for teams to have a clear view of the overall organization’s database performance.
Ways to Overcome This Challenge
In order to resolve this, companies will need to utilize a unified database monitoring solution that provides a single view into all of the databases supported by the company, regardless of which cloud platform they are hosted on. By implementing standardized monitoring policies, centralized logging of performance metrics, and cross-platform alerting, companies will have consistent views of their environment.
Problems with Instant Notification
A common challenge faced when dealing with instant notification issues is that many times, companies only discover that they are having an issue when they have slowed down or when a system fails altogether. In many instances, such as in financial services, healthcare, software as a service (SaaS), and e-commerce industries that require very high levels of availability, even just a few minutes of downtime can have drastic consequences on the financial bottom line and the level of customer confidence.
Addressing the Problem
A good approach to solving this problem is to monitor your databases in real-time and receive proactive alerts. Advanced monitoring products will provide visibility into metrics that are critical to the operation of a database environment, like query latency, CPU utilization,-memory utilization, and transaction throughput. By establishing intelligent thresholds for the metrics you are monitoring and implementing automated notifications, you will be able to detect problems earlier and fix them before they escalate into outages.
Low-Performance and Slow Query Execution
Most applications have low-performance issues caused by running slow, inefficient queries or having poorly optimized workloads. When your application grows, you may find it difficult to identify the root causes of these problems; as a result, you experience decreased user satisfaction, higher levels of transaction abandonment, decreased productivity levels for your users.
Addressing the Problem
Most modern database monitoring solutions provide users with the ability to analyze the performance of individual queries being executed within the monitored environment, as well as to monitor workload activity and establish performance baselines. In support of monitoring, continuous performance tuning of the application environment can be accomplished through the use of the monitoring capabilities.
Alert Fatigue and False Positives
Numerous organizations face a major challenge regarding the high volume of alerts that seem overwhelming to IT teams. When there are an unreasonable number of “false alarms” created by poorly-configured thresholds, the staff may suffer from “alert fatigue,” causing a failure to respond to critical events, as well as taking an excessive amount of time to respond.
Ways to Resolve This
Creating an intelligent alerting strategy is essential for efficient database monitoring. Appropriately prioritizing alerts based on their impact on the business, implementing anomaly detection rather than using stagnant threshold configurations, and using incident management applications to configure alert settings are the key components to an intelligent alerting strategy. Well-designed alerting systems reduce unnecessary alerts and improve the efficiency of response times by enabling the monitoring and alerting teams to focus on the most important items.
Security Threats and Compliance Demands
Cybercriminals have identified databases as their prime target for attacks on organizations, particularly in the United States, and threats to databases continue to grow, including ransomware attacks, insider abuse and misuse and unauthorized access, as well as increased compliance regulations. Traditional database monitoring solutions do not provide a sufficient amount of detail regarding suspicious activity.
How to Resolve This
Companies should include activity tracking in their overall database security monitoring strategy. Solutions that provide user behavior analytics, logging of audit trails, tracking of database access and real-time threat detection provide robust protection for databases. When combined with encryption and identity management, tracking provides a superb layer of protection within a company’s database security strategy.
Shortage of Qualified Staffing
Due to an imbalance in supply and demand for qualified professionals (e.g., database administrators or monitoring specialists), the majority of organizations in the United States are unable to find sufficient numbers of trained database professionals. As a result, the majority of organizations can only support monitoring through their existing internal teams, which, due to lack of staffing, typically spend their time performing operational tasks rather than actively optimizing their monitoring efforts.
How to Address This Challenge
Managed database monitoring services can provide a solution to this issue. Managed services provide organizations with access to 24/7 monitoring, expert-level tuning of monitored databases, and fast incident response time without having to expand internal teams. Managed services will provide continuous improvement and stability of database performance while offloading the operational burden of monitoring from the organization.
Lack of Alignment between Monitoring Efforts and Organizational Goals
In many cases, monitoring efforts are primarily focused on technical metrics without any clear link between the technical data being monitored and its associated business impact. As such, it becomes difficult for an organization’s leadership to appreciate the true value of the investment in monitoring.
How to Address This Challenge
Today’s monitoring strategies provide organizations with ways to align their technical monitoring data with their business objectives. Organizations can have custom dashboards, report generation tools, and performance analytics that help them evaluate the return on investment (ROI) on their monitoring efforts, identify areas for optimization, and support long-term digital transformation initiatives.
Scaling Monitoring While a Business Grows
As businesses grow and expand into more complex states, regions, countries, and around the world, database infrastructures change rapidly. Typically, monitoring solutions that work well for a small amount of data will not scale to meet the enterprise-level monitoring requirements.
How to Overcome It
In order to support growth, organizations must implement a scalable database monitoring architecture. Such a scalable architecture includes automation, cloud-native technologies, and auto-discovery, elastic scalability, and continuous integration. Scalability ensures that database monitoring doesn’t bog down as a result of growing support demands.
Conclusion: From Problems to Opportunities
Although database monitoring problems exist in every company in today’s increasingly complicated IT environment, they also present an opportunity to innovate. When handled properly, database monitoring problems can result in increased performance and greater security, lower downtime, and increased profits. US companies will derive a significant competitive advantage when they begin using intelligent, proactive, and scalable database monitoring solutions as opposed to monitoring their data reactively. By providing this kind of service to their customers, they allow their customers’ databases to remain functional and secure and ready to enable future innovations.
