Deploying applications in a hybrid cloud fashion provides businesses many benefits, but it also presents significant challenges—latency issues can be common, features differ across platforms, lack of configuration and control, performance visibility, and fluctuating monthly costs, to name a few. Database administrators have much to consider when architecting between on-premises and cloud environments, with the simple goal of ensuring database applications are performing no matter where they’re deployed. Let’s look into how to prevent database administrator headaches by uncovering a database solution and monitoring strategy to set you up for success.

Table of Contents hide

1 Database Administrator Headaches: Yes, They Happen

2 Infrastructure Monitoring for Databases? Uh, No!

3 Hybrid Cloud Database Monitoring Success

Database Administrator Headaches: Yes, They Happen

Databases typically don’t stand alone; they’re the back end to important enterprise applications. Database architecture includes redundancy, replication, and disaster recovery. There was a time when your databases (SQL, Oracle, etc.) were only on-premises, but now they can be deployed to cloud servers or subscribed to “as a service” options. But the complexity of what you could be architecting and deploying doesn’t end there. Applications with databases can co-exist between on-prem and cloud in a hybrid model, leaving database administrators with management and monitoring headaches in ways more prolific than when everything was on-premises alone.

Consider this situation: your ERP software platform has been migrated to a hybrid cloud deployment model, which includes a whole new element of complexity and cloud cost that wasn’t a factor before. There’s a partial system outage impacting the finance department at the end of the month, so this needs to be fixed ASAP. The process by which you would begin uncovering whether this is an issue with the database without a full-stack monitoring tool would involve these manual steps:

Start checking the ERP software and database logs in the cloud
Check the cloud provider’s outage alert pages
Open a ticket with the cloud provider so they can start investigating
Log in to each on-prem server related to the ERP system and check event logs
Check infrastructure monitoring for on-premises configuration

After all this investigation, hours have likely passed, and you might discover one of the cloud databases is having some intermittent issues with staying online. According to Gartner, the cost of downtime can be over $5,600 per minute, depending on the type of downtime.

This is a headache no database administrator wants, and the business doesn’t want to absorb the cost of the outage.

Infrastructure Monitoring for Databases? Uh, No!

There is sometimes an expectation for database administrators to rely completely on server infrastructure monitoring to gauge the resources impacting performance and outages. Though this can be helpful, it can be difficult to get true insights this way because a database will always consume all the memory you give it. If the server memory looks fully consumed, this adds an element of confusion to the troubleshooting. It’s imperative to deploy true database monitoring capable of monitoring your on-premises, cloud-deployed, and as a service databases to proactively get complete visibility into what’s going on. Infrastructure monitoring isn’t database monitoring, and it should never be considered enough.

Hybrid Cloud Database Monitoring Success

There is a misconception that just because you move your databases to the cloud, the life of your database administrator becomes simple. But in full-stack monitoring, you can’t make your database administrator’s life easier without complete visibility no matter where the enterprise data exists. Database application performance is also almost impossible to proactively gauge without a centralized tool set for monitoring. Finally, infrastructure monitoring isn’t enough to really know the performance and uptime of your databases, and this is even truer with hybrid cloud deployments. Full-stack monitoring is necessary to ensure business availability, avoid downtime, and enjoy hybrid cloud database monitoring success.

Preventing Database Administrator Headaches With a Hybrid Cloud Database Monitoring Strategy

Database Administrator Headaches: Yes, They Happen

Infrastructure Monitoring for Databases? Uh, No!

Hybrid Cloud Database Monitoring Success