Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you've ever run an ALTER TABLE on a busy MySQL table in production, you know the feeling. The change is small. The risk isn't. Long-running table locks, queued writes, application timeouts, replication lag, a five-minute migration that turns into a half-hour incident review. We're shipping an integration that takes that anxiety out of the loop. Harness Database DevOps now supports Percona Toolkit for MySQL as part of Liquibase-based schema management.

The new Query Plan Compare feature in Redgate Monitor helps PostgreSQL DBAs see when the optimizer switches plans for the same query, and understand why, so they can diagnose sudden performance changes faster.

Observability in software is often framed as a choice between self-hosted and SaaS: manage it yourself, or pay a vendor to handle your data. Both self-hosted and SaaS approaches have their merits, but assuming you must choose one exclusively over the other leads to poor trade-offs: either overcommitting to an all-in-one SaaS despite spiraling costs, or fully self-hosting when it’s unnecessary.

N+1 queries are the most common performance problem in Rails applications. ActiveRecord’s lazy loading means every belongs_to, has_many, and has_one association is a potential N+1 waiting to happen. The good news is that Rails gives you multiple ways to fix them, and tools like Scout can find them automatically. This guide covers everything a Rails developer needs to know about N+1 queries: what they are, how to fix them, how to prevent them in CI, and how to detect them in production.

Netdata has always collected database metrics: connections, throughput, replication lag, buffer cache hit ratios, and so on. These tell you that something is wrong, but they don’t tell you why. When your PostgreSQL response time spikes, the metric alone doesn’t tell you which query is responsible. For that, you’ve traditionally needed to SSH into the box, connect to the database, and run diagnostic queries manually. Or set up a separate database monitoring tool entirely.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam brought together about 13,500 attendees this year, the largest turnout yet. The size of the event showed just how much the cloud-native space has grown, and how central observability, platform engineering, and cost control have become. For VictoriaMetrics, this year’s event was a mix of talks, booth conversations, and a lot of direct feedback from users.

Following our 2025 updates, here we recap how VictoriaMetrics Anomaly Detection evolved in Q1 2026. Stay tuned for upcoming content on anomaly detection.

Part 2: Key insights from a fireside chat with Chris Yates. Read part 1 here. Choosing a database monitoring vendor isn't just about features. Once you’re confident that it’s time to reassess your database monitoring strategy, the natural instinct is to start comparing products. However, it’s vital to know how to assess vendor relationships, support quality, and product innovation before you sign anything.

AI Classify reaches general availability this month, TDM gets a Docker image, and we’ve added a few things you’ve been asking for.