Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.

As the well-known saying goes, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. This might not be true of everything in life, but it certainly is true of job interviews. Whether you’re preparing for a product design interview at Redgate, or elsewhere, here are some key considerations to help ensure that you get your preparations right.

How do you know your SQL Server system is running well? Is it the simple method of noting no one is complaining? (Sadly, in many businesses, this is exactly how it's done.) The fact is, if you're not monitoring SQL Server performance, you don't know.

2021 was a great year for VictoriaMetrics! We delivered a lot of new features, our team doubled in size, and so did the list of public case studies written by VictoriaMetrics users as well as the community contributions to the product. See our 2021 Momentum blog post for details on all our achievements last year. All this wouldn’t be possible without our supportive community, their help, patience and creativity.

The 2021 year is finished, so it’s time to look at changes VictoriaMetrics has gained during the past year. The first release in 2021 was v1.52.0. The last release in 2021 was v1.71.0. More than 20 new releases of VictoriaMetrics were published during the 2021. The full changelog is available at this page. Let’s look at the most interesting changes.

Oh goody, I’m so tickled to get this one. *rubs hands gleefully* Funny story, back in 2016–2017 we thought we were building Honeycomb primarily for DB use cases. The use cases are that killer. I’ve never seen another tool do the kinds of things you can do on the fly with Honeycomb and databases.

We took advantage of the quiet days between holidays to look back on the year past and thank our users and customers for their support in 2021 - and wish you a very happy 2022!

An email recently came to our team (the Redgate Advocates) asking us what we thought the key challenges for data professionals might be in 2022. Kathi Kellenberger, Steve Jones and I each answered independently. We all bring different experiences and thoughts to the table, yet we all came up with three common themes. Here is what we all feel is likely to be of the most importance this year.