Database

Latest Posts in Database

What Is Cardinality in Monitoring?

I wrote a couple of “definitions and nuances” posts about terminology in databases recently (cardinality, selectivity), and today I want to write one about cardinality in monitoring, as opposed to…

What is Database Index Selectivity?

I wrote recently about database cardinality, and there’s a closely related topic that is equally confusing and I want to explain too: index selectivity. Index selectivity is how tightly a…

A Million Little Things: Strive for Greater Efficiency

OK, so a million is a little bit of an exaggeration, but there are tons of cool features inside our SentryOne solutions that I find a lot of our customers…

Five Common Problems with SQL Server

I’ve been working with SQL Server since what seems like forever ++1. The truth is I haven’t been a production DBA in more than 6 years (I work in marketing now,…

How NOT to Monitor Your Database

Do you have experience putting out backend database fires? What were some things you wished you had done differently? Proactive database monitoring is more cost efficient, manageable, and sanity-saving than…

SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor & Grafana: Better Together

Many of our customers have asked us to integrate with Grafana, the popular open platform for analytics and monitoring. The wait is over: we’ve released a plugin that lets you…

After It Broke: Executing Good Postmortems

No matter how much automation, redundancy, and protection you build into your systems, thing are always going to break. It might be a change breaking an API to another system.…

Five Must-dos of Database Performance Management

Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database performance management. Databases are complex, multifaceted, and vital to the health of every agency. They…

Choosing What to Monitor – Understanding Key Metrics

Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, because monitoring performance metrics and…

Customizing Logwatch for Sysadmin Needs

Logwatch is essentially a system log analyzer and reporter. It elaborates logs that are simply collected by syslog. This kind of evolution is simplifying the daily job of modern system…