Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop is a widely used demonstration environment designed to illustrate the concepts and practical implementation of observability in distributed systems. Built as a microservice-based e-commerce application, the demo provides developers with a near real-world environment where they can explore how telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—can be collected, processed, and visualized.

Database latency rarely starts in your app layer because it’s almost always a query doing more work than it should. Metrics tell you when that happens, but slow-query logging tells you which statement did it and how. That’s gold for tracking down missing indexes, inefficient filters, or accidental full scans. Pair the logging with a some lightweight counter metrics, and you get both an early warning and a clear path to a fix.

John Q Martin, Technology & Alliances Partner Manager at Redgate, covers 10 mistakes he's made when migrating databases to the cloud - and the strategies he now implements to avoid them happening again. But first, John explains exactly why databases are the hardest part of cloud migration.

Redgate Test Data Manager’s September release introduces AI dataset generation, streamlined database connectivity, and improved validation. These updates eliminate manual work and configuration errors while maintaining security and data quality standards.

When an application slows down, users rarely think about the database—but in many cases, that’s where the bottleneck lies. Databases sit at the core of nearly every application, storing, retrieving, and processing the information that powers business transactions, analytics, and user interactions. A minor inefficiency in query execution or a spike in resource usage can cascade into multiple issues, starting with degraded application performance, service interruptions, or even downtime.

Redgate Monitor now supports Oracle Data Guard environments, giving DBAs instant visibility into replication health, lag and role transitions, so Standbys stay in sync and are ready to protect availability and data when needed. DBAs running Oracle Data Guard know that keeping replicas healthy requires constant vigilance. It often involves querying dynamic performance views, such as V$DATAGUARD_STATS, or running Data Guard Broker commands to check lag and role status.

Understand what's happening inside your database before your users do. Modern applications live and breathe through their databases. But when slow queries, connection spikes, or failed transactions start to pile up, the impact isn't just technical—it's customer-facing. That's why tracking your databases gives you the visibility into how your databases are performing under the hood.