Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2023

Migrating to Icinga DB

Although Icinga DB has been around for some time and many customers and users are already using it, there may still be some who are wondering how to upgrade/migrate to Icinga DB. This post will briefly explain the components of the Icinga DB and how to install them in a reasonable order. Note that it is assumed that all components are installed on the Icinga primary node(s) using a MySQL/MariaDB database.

Top MySQL Monitoring Tools

As a database administrator, ensuring the smooth running of your MySQL database is paramount. Keeping an eye on vital statistics such as uptime, query performance, and resource utilization is a crucial aspect of maintaining database health. Fortunately, several monitoring tools are available in the market to help you keep track of these metrics. These tools provide you with insights that enable you to optimize database performance and prevent any potential threats.

What is the SPACE developer productivity framework?

The SPACE framework is an acronym for an approach to measuring, understanding, and optimizing engineering productivity. Outlined by researchers from GitHub, Microsoft, and the University of Victoria, it encourages leaders to look at productivity holistically, placing leading metrics in context with each other and linking them to output, often team goals, rather than individual effort. The SPACE framework breaks productivity into five metrics.

How to secure your database

Cybersecurity threats are increasing in volume, complexity and impact. Yet, organisations struggle to counter these growing threats. Cyber attacks often intend to steal, damage, hijack or alter value-generating data. In this article around database security, we use the NIST framework to lay out the common controls that you can implement to secure your databases. Let’s start by discussing the potential impact of unsecured databases.

Database Migrations in the Era of Kubernetes Microservices

In our extensive guide of best ci/cd practices we included a dedicated section for database migrations and why they should be completely automated and given the same attention as application deployments. We explained the theory behind automatic database migrations, but never had the opportunity to talk about the actual tools and give some examples on how database migrations should be handled by a well disciplined software team.

SQL Sentry Quick Demo | Query Tuning

SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help you quickly identify and address Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance problems that could delay, or even halt, data delivery. Find out how SQL Sentry can help you troubleshoot bottlenecks and optimize database performance. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

SQL Sentry Quick Demo | Performance Monitoring

SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help you quickly identify and address Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance problems that could delay, or even halt, data delivery. Find out how SQL Sentry can help you troubleshoot bottlenecks and optimize database performance. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

SQL Sentry Quick Demo | Capacity Planning

SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help you quickly identify and address Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance problems that could delay, or even halt, data delivery. Find out how SQL Sentry can help you troubleshoot bottlenecks and optimize database performance. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

SQL Sentry Quick Demo | Alerting

SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help you quickly identify and address Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance problems that could delay, or even halt, data delivery. Find out how SQL Sentry can help you troubleshoot bottlenecks and optimize database performance. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

How to mitigate the challenges of data growth

Over the last decade, I’ve rarely met a data professional whose organization wasn’t experiencing data growth and making more demands of their data. We build and deploy new applications faster than we retire old ones, and new data is accumulating dramatically faster on our existing systems than our ability to decide to delete older information. Additionally, the ever-growing number of users and devices interacting with that data increases the strain on the infrastructure underpinning it.

Why Andy Warhol would like - and dislike - AI

In a series of blog posts about AI, I’ve been looking at how intelligent ChatGPT is, how good ChatGPT and Bing are when you employ them as a technology writer, and how the engineering team at Redgate is using GitHub Copilot to aid with writing code. Now it’s time to take a look at image creation tools, and where better to start than Andy Warhol? I like Andy Warhol.

Monitoring Redis Clusters with Prometheus

This article will outline what Redis database monitoring is and how to set up a Redis database monitoring system with MetricFire. Then we’ll show what the final graphs and dashboards look like when displayed on Grafana. We will be using Prometheus and Grafana to power the monitoring, and we'll use a simulated Redis DB to generate the data for the Grafana dashboards. ‍ ‍

SQL Server Terms Translated into PostgreSQL

The rise in popularity of open-source RBDMs has encouraged many organizations to adopt PostgreSQL, but as a DBA or Developer, it can be challenging when exploring new database platforms, no matter how experienced you are. When looking at SQL Server, it has many similarities to PostgreSQL, but there are several big differences too.

How using a database monitoring tool helps DBAs create value for the whole organization

As the size and complexity of database estates increases, with more workloads and data being hosted on more platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud, so the appeal of third-party database monitoring tools has also grown. Their ability to provide a holistic view of an entire estate and monitor multiple databases and platforms from a single dashboard has been shown to save DBAs and IT teams many hours of time when compared to home-grown solutions.

Why we generate & collect logs: About the usability & cost of modern logging systems

Logs and log management have been around far longer than monitoring and it is easy to forget just how useful and essential they can be for modern observability. Most of you will know us for VictoriaMetrics, our open source time series database and monitoring solution. Metrics are our “thing”; but as engineers, we’ve had our fair share of frustrations in the past caused by modern logging systems that tend to create further complexity, rather than removing it.