The increasing deployment of Postgres has brought about new demands for features, capabilities, and tools from developers and database administrators. As the leading Postgres database platform company, EnterpriseDB® (EDB™) works closely with customers to respond to their emerging needs.
One of the most important contributions EDB makes to the advancement of Postgres is in the development of tools to make it easier for DBAs to deploy, manage, and administer the database. The EDB Postgres™ Platform provides comprehensive tool suites. These assist DBAs with manageability and migration, and in establishing configurations that meet enterprise requirements for high availability, security, and disaster recovery.
A centerpiece of the EDB tool suites is the EDB Postgres™ Enterprise Manager, which enables DBAs to monitor, manage, and tune Postgres databases easily. EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager is unique insofar as there is no other tool available that accomplishes all of these tasks. From a single graphical interface, EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager gives DBAs control over vast deployments, scaling with the number of databases, and becoming more critical to operations as the number of databases increases. It also has a distributed architecture, so from one EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager instance, DBAs can install the tool to each separate operating system instance, saving time and increasing manageability.
[New features have recently been introduced in EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager v7.1. Watch demos: new drag and drop feature to reorganize charts in the dynamic dashboard; new feature for linking a zoom on a specific time interval in one line chart that will zoom in on same time internal across other line charts; new controls for hiding/viewing acknowledged alerts on the Alert Dashboard, and more.]
DBAs faced a host of challenges before EDB introduced EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager, such as:
- The inability to monitor from one centralized location all of their Postgres deployments. Having to check deployments manually created a serious risk of problems that could arise and cause damage before being caught.
- The inability to manage, with powerful tools from a single interface, all of their Postgres deployments. This resulted in DBAs spending a great deal of time (and expense for the organization) manually administering databases one by one.
- Alert mechanisms in commonly available tools for open source PostgreSQL that could not be customized for each Postgres instance and therefore were limited as to what they could be used for.
- The inability to integrate the most commonly available tools for open source PostgreSQL with solutions typically used to monitor overall network infrastructures.
So, how did EDB Enterprise Manager solve these problems? Consider the following, drawing from examples of how EnterpriseDB customers have deployed EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager:
- Centralized Monitoring: EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager provides a graphical console that helps DBAs to manage Postgres servers using visual elements. Dashboards are optimized for large screens, helping operational teams to monitor Postgres health within a single view. An EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager homepage provides general overview information and alert status of all Postgres instances. EDB customers rely on replication monitoring with EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager as well, all in the same single view.
- Powerful Postgres Management: Managing dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of database deployments, typically has been a problem. With EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager, EnterpriseDB customers configure Streaming Replication clusters and monitor for high availability with EDB Postgres Failover Manager; they perform database backups and manage storage and tablespaces; they review capacity planning documents; and, they manage system configuration and security settings.
- Customizable Alerts: EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager is the only tool that both provides Postgres-specific alerts along with custom alerts. Typically, generic alerts work with general database issues. But access to alerts specific to Postgres enables DBAs to configure mechanisms with their own custom SQL queries that watch for issues specific to the applications. This advantage has proven to be very popular among EDB’s customers. In addition, EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager comes with a variety of pre-defined alerts for a company’s operating system, databases, and other objects.
- Ecosystem Integration: Large enterprises often have a central monitoring solution for their network infrastructure. EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager can send SNMP traps to SNMP-aware monitoring software so that all alerts can be obtained from a single location. This enables customers to integrate Postgres alerts with their central monitoring systems, helping them to track everything using a single system.
The upshot is that all of these features (and more) help EDB’s customers to build a reliable Postgres monitoring and management infrastructure.
Devrim Gündüz is a Principal Systems Engineer for EnterpriseDB.
