PMM – SolarWinds (Vivid Cortex) Open Source Alternative

What is Database Monitoring Tools and Why do You Need Them

Databases are often the core of most systems, and it is very important to know every moment if it is healthy and work properly.

When your project is not so big it is enough standard common monitoring tools. But when your bases grow you probably want to get more information about them. Database health is not the only thing you are interested now.

Such things like performance, queries, connections and other kinds of statistics may have more sense for you and can save your money (or rase your costs if you use your resources ineffectively).

So in that case you need some specific tools which are specially designed for monitoring databases.

Tools for Databases Monitoring

One of the most popular tools for databases monitoring is VividCortex from SolarWinds. It is supplied as SaaS (software as a service).

VividCortex allows you to monitor errors, latency, slow queries, replication health, max connections, disk health. It provides dashboards out of the box, and guides you on which metrics you should monitor.

Another feature is events. For example, if you are getting closer to the maximum of any threshold, id will emit an event. This approach removes ambiguity around which metrics are important to monitor.

The most advantage of VividCortex is SaaS platform. That means that you don’t need to have any infrastructure to host your monitoring services. You just install agents to your database hosts and that’s all.

Another cool thing is 24/4 support and good training programs. That means it is needed minimum efforts from you to setup and manage your monitoring system. SolarWinds gives you 14 days of trial period to try the service. And the price is available on demand and not available in public domain. So, we can conclude VividCortex is a good enterprise product for big and loaded projects.

But if you are not a big company and you don’t need such level of vendor support. Is there any open source alternatives for such powerful tool as VividCortex? Fortunately yes. There is

Percona Monitoring and Management

It is an open source database monitoring, management and observability solution for databases. It is very powerful tool for database monitoring. PMM leverages Prometheus and provides dashboards about of the box.

Monitoring capabilities allow you to watch under slow queries, errors, replication lag, max connections, disk space etc.

Built in advisors run regular checks of potential security threats.

Performance degradation, data loss and data corruption.

PMM gives you several models of using. You may deploy it on your own infrastructure and manage it by your own team absolutely free. But if you need a professional support you may get it 24×7. And PMM is also available as SaaS.

To conclude, we can say that Percona Monitoring and Management is a good alternative for enterprise solutions like VividCortex. It gives you the almost the same powerful abilities to monitor and manage your databases.

It is free OpenSource product, so it will be suitable for not big companies and projects. But it PMM can be also distributed as SaaS with 24×7 support for enterprise world.