Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is a guest post from Kellyn Gorman. Kellyn Gorman is a Database and AI Advocate and Engineer at Redgate She's the previous director of Data and AI at Silk, and the Oracle SME in Azure at Microsoft. With a robust background in cloud technology and a passion for promoting its merits and potential, I am thrilled to spearhead conversations and actions that help shape the future of this industry.

In case you don't know the back story, in order for me to play with radios and label it "work," I've created a PostgreSQL database running on AWS Aurora. The db is fed from API calls to aprs.fi through Lambda functions on AWS. Some of the DDL & code is mine. Some is from Claude. Neither of us paid much attention to indexing when we were putting things together.

This is a guest post from Phil James. Database teams are already juggling a lot. Monitoring the performance of complex, multi-platform estates takes expertise and focus — and that's before you factor in installing, maintaining, and updating the monitoring tooling itself. That's the tension we've been hearing from database teams for a while. The monitoring solution is supposed to reduce operational burden, yet the infrastructure that runs it adds more.

This is a guest post from udara.ratnakumara. In a recent webinar I hosted with my colleague Chris Hawkins, Inside a DBA’s Day: What Really Happens and How to Stay Ahead, we talked through the realities of a typical DBA day and the practical ways teams can stay ahead of issues rather than constantly reacting. For many DBAs, the day doesn’t start with coffee. It starts with an alert. A report is suddenly slow. An application query is timing out.

Using live data outside production is one of the fastest ways to create compliance risk, because it quickly becomes harder to control who can access it, how it is handled, and how long it is kept. A Test Data Management (TDM) approach provides exactly the kind of controls SOC 2 auditors look for in this situation: an automated, traceable end-to-end process for protecting, provisioning, and removing customer data so it can be used safely in non-production environments.

This is a guest post from James Hemson. Redgate Test Data Manager's latest release adds Entra ID authentication, multi-target anonymization, and direct treatment code editing, with workflow improvements to make pipeline management faster and more flexible. Entra ID Authentication You can now connect to SQL Server using token-based authentication via Azure Entra ID, for both anonymization and subsetting.

This is a guest post from Adrian Tan. Over recent months, we’ve been steadily improving PostgreSQL monitoring in Redgate Monitor, with a singular focus: to help Postgres users diagnose performance problems faster, with less manual investigation. The latest updates and new features tackle this problem in a few different ways.

SQL Prompt's February releases focused on compatibility and stability, with a critical fix for SSMS 22.3 users and several features graduating from experimental to fully supported.

This is a guest post from James Hemson. For years, the test data management market has told smaller companies the same story. Test data is complex. You need consultants. Compliance is expensive. Expect a six-month implementation before you see any value. At Redgate we think that's wrong. And we think it's wrong by design. Complexity creates services revenue. It creates switching costs. Most vendors have built their businesses around this.

This is a guest post from Nick Coombe. Redgate Monitor's built-in metrics cover the most common database pressure points out of the box. However, every estate has a few KPIs and metrics that are specific to the business, and users can create custom metrics to track those signals and receive an alert when they cross a threshold.