It’s easy to observe (pun intended) in the rear-view mirror. Hindsight bias aside, 2017 was a big year for SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) and our customers! We shipped lots of features and made tons of progress on the business. Here’s a brief overview of some of our proudest moments from 2017.
Enhanced PostgreSQL support
We love PostgreSQL, and we released lots of enhancements for it! Here’s some of the stuff we did for our PostgreSQL customers:
- Supported the great work the Postgres community did on version 10 and all its new features
- Made SolarWinds DPM awesome for our customers who use CitusDB
- Added support to monitor PgBouncer, which nearly everyone who’s using Postgres in a mission-critical environment is using by default
- Added SQL query analysis to provide that extra level of database-specific insight, so you get help really understanding what your SQL does
- Added support for collecting and analyzing lots more data. You can now rank, sort, slice-and-dice so many things: Queries, Databases and Verbs by Shared Blocks Hit, Shared Blocks Read, Shared Blocks Dirtied, Shared Blocks Written, Local Blocks Hit, Local Blocks Read, Local Blocks Dirtied, Local Blocks Written, Temp Blocks Read, Temp Blocks Written, Block Read Time and Block Write Time. And that's not all, you can rank and profile Verbs and Users too!
Released Many MongoDB Improvements
We spent a ton of time expanding our support for our MongoDB customers. A few of the many things we improved:
- Index analysis, a key pain point for MongoDB, which relies heavily on indexes for performance
- Automatic discovery of the full MongoDB scale-out configuration, including support for discovering and monitoring mongod, mongos, and config servers
- Auto-discovery of replication sets and clusters
- A Node Group view to visualize the cluster hierarchy
- Deep profiling capabilities for missing indexes, locking performance, data size, index size, and looking for blocking and most frequent queries in db.currentOp() -- plus a bunch more!
- Cursor operations, EXPLAIN, new expert dashboards, and more
- In-app help documentation tooltips to help you understand all those MongoDB metrics and what they mean
Released Extended Support for Amazon RDS
We added support for enhanced metrics in Amazon RDS, so now you get CloudWatch, host metrics, and tons more detail. This is super helpful when trying to debug black-box behaviors on RDS!
Released Expert Insights
In October we released Expert Insights for PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MySQL. These features automatically and continually monitor your databases with dozens of rules and checks. They essentially continually test your database’s state and behavior to provide best practice recommendations about configuration, security, and query construction. Now you don’t have to manually review everything, because SolarWinds DPM never sleeps!
Improved Charts and Dashboards
We released a bunch of updates to the Charts section in 2017. KPI dashboards for MongoDB and PostgreSQL are new chart categories with key performance indicator (KPI) metrics preselected by our brainiacs. They show you the most important performance and health information at a glance. Built by experts, so you don’t have to do all that work yourself:
The new "System Resources by Hosts" category of charts plots several hosts on each chart so you can easily spot outliers. In the following screenshot, you can immediately see one of the hosts has much higher CPU utilization than the others:
There’s more. We redesigned Charts and Dashboards for a better experience with hundreds or thousands of hosts: new summarized charts scale to infinity and beyond, and you can make your own custom dashboards. Customize away!
