SolarWinds has announced extensive correlation and visibility into the database and the layers that support it with enhancements to SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), delivering database administrators – or DBAs – valuable insight into the database’s impact on other layers of an application stack and empowering them to provide their IT departments with the solution to the common concern: “Why is this app so slow?”
SolarWinds DPA, with its unique approach that includes Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis™, continuously monitors SQL Server®, Oracle®, Sybase® and DB2® databases on physical, cloud-based and VMware® servers to identify database performance issues that impact end-user response times, isolate root cause, show historical performance trends, and correlate metrics with response time and performance. In its latest version, SolarWinds DPA 9.0 adds storage resource visibility and correlation, providing database admins with unique insight into how storage I/O issues contribute to poor response time; and adds metric baselining and alerting, which enables DBAs to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues within minutes.
“Simply put, application performance is database performance, so when apps are slow, fingers often point at the database and the DBA. However, since databases are complex and full of core critical information, we need to look to the DBAs not to place blame, but to find solutions,” said Gerardo Dada, vice president of product marketing, SolarWinds. “Now with SolarWinds DPA 9.0, DBAs have insight both into the performance of databases and how they work with other components that support an app. In this way, DBAs essentially become the performance gurus of an IT department, offering a single truth that aligns teams behind facts and empowers them to take action.”
New in SolarWinds DPA 9.0: DBAs have the power to answer, “Is the app issue in the database?”
No, the problem is somewhere else: DBAs can eliminate the database as the source of the problem and provide context into how other components of the IT infrastructure correlate with database activities. With NEW storage I/O analysis, DBAs can see the impacts of storage on the database workload, gaining insight into how storage issues such as latency and disk performance can contribute to poor database response time and ultimately impact the end user of an application.
Yes, the problem is in the database: Database performance is dynamic, so DBAs need the right tools to be able to compare expected performance with abnormal performance. With NEW resource metric baselining and alerting, DBAs can proactively identify resource outliers, correlating with app response time, and then drill deeper to see if the problem indeed originated in the database and, if so, how to resolve it.
“SolarWinds DPA is a massive value-add to maintaining an application’s vitality and health. It shows you exactly where to look, so if you’re seeing I/O SQL waits, then you know you should focus on the I/O subsystem and storage layer to troubleshoot the performance – this saves hours and even days of troubleshooting,” said Barry Duran, principal architect for infrastructure database administration, Nielsen. “SolarWinds DPA assists DBAs in many ways with troubleshooting databases and benefits developers so they can proactively improve their code to maintain good performance. It’s one of those things you get and wonder how you ever did it before you had it.”
Database Trends and Applications Magazinehonored SolarWinds DPA twice in 2014, including it in the second annual DBTA 100 list of “The Companies that Matter Most in Data” and naming the product a finalist for “Best Database Performance Solution” in the DBTA Readers’ Choice Awards.
SolarWinds DPA is based on a non-intrusive agentless architecture, making it safe to use in production environments with negligible performance impact. SolarWinds DPA can be used to monitor thousands of database instances running on premise, VMware or in the cloud.
This article was originally posted “SolarWinds Releases Enhanced DPA” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
