A Guide to Proactive Monitoring for Modern Databases

Many issues have the ability to affect a company’s database performance, and these points of failure represent a serious threat to the business continuity and viability of an enterprise. If downtime of the database is experienced for any reason, organisations face the reality of losing customers because they are unable to provide services, which means lost income and unacceptable levels of risk for the business.

More often than not, however, these potentially damaging incidents can be prevented through proactive monitoring of the database, alerting organisations to issues before they can escalate into real problems. With proactive database monitoring, alerts are sent out once thresholds are reached for certain issues, allowing these to be addressed before they can escalate and cause downtime or impact performance of the database.

This type of service allows organisations to not only monitor and alert on problems, it also enables a history of all past issues to be recorded, so problems can be accurately investigated to prevent reoccurrence.

Examples of what proactive database monitoring will pick up

Onsite or offsite database monitoring?

Proactive monitoring solutions can be run as a remote service using an outsourced provider to pick up alerts and inform the organisation of any impending problems. The service can also be run onsite, but in this instance should also be monitored offsite to ensure that all problems are picked up in a timely fashion and that issues and alerts are not overlooked.

At the end of the day, the business case for proactive monitoring comes down to the most critical business issue – money. Without the database and broader IT environment a business simply cannot run, which means loss of income, loss of productivity and higher costs to fix problems. Using a proactive monitoring solution can negate these issues, and in the long run if downtime can be minimised, the cost of database monitoring is offset with higher uptime rates, and the service ultimately pays for itself.

Contact RDB Consulting for proactive database monitoring – Jennifer Mbesa jennifer@rdbconsulting.com or +27 (0)11 807 7663