Database And Middleware Monitoring And Tuning - Proactive Approach

As software complexity increases, administrators are having hard time identifying and removing performance bottlenecks.

(PRWEB) May 2, 2007 -- As databases and middleware become more and more complex, companies face a hard choice of either completely relying on their users' feedback to hunt their performance problems or implementing a universal solution in an attempt to guard from all types of failures and slowdowns. While reacting to the user feedback has the benefit of directly identifying the problem, users may not always express their concern before they begin to vote with their money. A universal solution can become plain too expensive to handle both in terms of price and the expertise required to support. A new breed of tools emerge, such as FourthElephant's Insider for Oracle (http://fourthelephant.com/) that try to fill the gap between these two extremes by taking the role of a critical user and pointing to the actual and potential problems before the real users start to.

Indeed a typical database or a middleware server reports hundreds of performance related characteristics while more complex solutions such as Oracle may have well over a thousand. Moreover these numbers have to be multiplied by the number of servers since an administrator usually handles multiple servers. It is not unheard of to have 50 or more databases per DBA. How would an administrator possibly deal with this load of information let alone in real time? Quite often SLAs restrict service providers to just minutes of downtime so these minutes become precious. These new tools should help shorten that time by filtering out only the statistics that are relevant at the moment and presenting them in an intuitive and easily digestible form. The approach taken by the FourthElephant's team is to take over the statistic gathering and analysis and display the results on a single screen. More often than not this is all that is required. The product does have a number of other views to drill down to a specific problem or take a preventive action.

Insider for Oracle (http://fourthelephant.com/) offers a proactive approach to monitoring and tuning by offloading much of the statistic collecting and interpretation burden to its sophisticated rules and alerts engine. Unlike many other enterprise monitoring tools it installs and is ready to use within seconds. A single installation can easily handle hundreds of databases without requiring enterprise-class hardware. Throughout its user interface it employs a principle that a human eye reacts to motion better than to any other type of visual communication, displaying various performance characteristics such as session activity with animation-style moving controls. Its appearance may create an impression that the product targets beginner to mid-level administrator but this impression is deceptive. Capable of saving and analyzing performance statistics for a month's worth of history it offers a complete set of tools even to an expert and those who tried to set up a collection of monitoring scripts will appreciate its comprehensive alert engine covering around a hundred performance and availability related conditions.

These new tools help offset the ever increasing complexity of databases and middleware by using a proactive approach to finding and removing bottlenecks before they turn into performance problems. The dynamic nature of modern business and especially global online 24x7 services demand monitoring solutions that eliminate or minimize downtime while not requiring a steep learning curve or huge time and money investment.

FourthElephant (http://fourthelephant.com/) is a Massachusetts based company specializing in database monitoring and tuning products. Insider for Oracle (http://fourthelephant.com/) is an Oracle tuning and monitoring tool based on a new proactive monitoring and tuning approach.

Contact:

Vadim Bobrov

Phone:(508) 714 0731

Fax:(508) 877 7414

info @ fourthelephant.com

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