One of the most common performance problems with SQL Server databases in production is the blocking of queries, which happens because database resources are locked. Understanding why locking happens is just half the battle. Being able to resolve locking, which will resolve blocking issues as well, is the second half.

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.

PostgreSQL is a popular open-source, object-relational database. As with any other data storage solution, capturing metrics is crucial for making sure your database is reliable, available, and performing optimally. This will help you dig deeper into database performance problems, do performance tuning, optimize queries and indexes, and make partitioning decisions. But that’s not all. You’ll also be able to set up alerts and plan for failures or upgrades.

For many businesses, using a Managed Services Provider (MSP) makes sense, particularly when it comes to database management, monitoring and security. They can control costs while still having access to expert resources, and dial up or down the service as required. It’s perhaps no surprise then that 47% of people surveyed in the Channel Futures 2020 MSP 501 Report identified professional services as a growth area, 51% identified enhanced network monitoring, and 85% identified security services.

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than just rely on my own knowledge, I reached out to a number of people to see how they accomplished this. I’m going to summarize their process for you here in order to help others who may find themselves in need of this information.

It’s important to be able to look at the entirety of your application architecture, not just specific aspects of it, and understand how different parts connect. Observability comes first, followed by monitoring. In this post, we’ll dive into the database part of your architecture to show how you can monitor and optimize your database performance.

This year we’ve been expanding SQL Monitor’s capabilities around the theme of Estate Management and we’ve just released a new capability – the discovery of on-premises SQL Servers and instances. We started on this journey with basic instance configuration observability and alerting earlier this year. While gathering feedback and finding ways to improve our new configuration features, we worked on and released an Instance Discovery Tool as a preview feature.

Anyone who is responsible for database performance knows how demanding and challenging database performance tuning is when managing a database. One of the critical functions of this process – database monitoring – is often overlooked. Database monitoring includes identifying the right SQL for tuning, determining right way to tune and whether SQL is right thing to tune.

We’ve reached the final piece of our five-part series, and while I’m sad to end it, I hope you or your DBA teams have learned enough to move forward with the Information Management Maturity Model (IMMM). Although there are five steps to this model, several DBAs stop at the fourth. It’s common for large organizations to give this step to management and higher-ups, rather than DBA teams.