Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There’s a big difference between the MySQL database powering your internet of things (IoT) lightbulb and the one powering your website. There’s a chasm between the SQL Server Express database in your lightly used application’s VM and the monster multi-region SQL cluster you have running on Microsoft Azure. This kind of database diversity is everywhere today. But what are the differences between these databases, and how can administrators justify database spend?

You’ve solved database performance monitoring and documentation. Unfortunately, now you get lost between them.

Mergers and acquisitions are going on all over the market at the moment … and de-mergers as well, actually. Typically in a merger or acquisition, there’s some knowledge that it’s going to happen in advance. But until the Heads of Terms have been signed and there’s a Transition Service Agreement in place, people don’t really get moving with the activity needed to support the move, particularly on the technology side.

Deep specialization of IT administrators is a luxury only the largest organizations can typically afford. Smaller organizations rely on IT administrators with a more generalist skill set because they are—by necessity—responsible for a wide array of different technologies, and there simply isn’t time to specialize in the intricacies for any one of them. Yet modern IT is intricate.

Most of us have encountered a situation like the following at some point in our careers: something either isn’t working right or could be working better. You’ve been through the process to understand the problem and identify solutions. (Check out my blog post “4 Steps to Efficiently Solve Problems” if you’re still working on understanding the problem.) Now it’s time to pick a solution—and you can’t get stakeholders to agree on one.

In this article, you will learn how to monitor SQL Server with Prometheus. SQL Server is a popular database, which is very straightforward to monitor with a simple Prometheus exporter. Like all databases, SQL Server has many points of failure, such as delays in transactions or too many connections in the database. We are basing this guide on Golden Signals, a reduced set of metrics that offer a wide view of a service from a user or consumer perspective.