Data is a critical asset, and effectively utilizing it depends on your database. It is important to rigorously monitor your Postgres database to ensure continuous availability and optimal performance. Today's complex IT structures require proactive monitoring to prevent issues that could lead to system outages, data loss or other critical issues.
Monitoring improves business effectiveness and efficiency
Monitoring is key for keeping your database up and running smoothly. An effective database monitoring strategy will enable you to:
1) Maintain Availability – By monitoring your database ecosystem, you can safeguard Postgres availability and protect your revenue and reputation. Metrics such as database availability, database connections, transaction wraparound, Database growth rate, disk usage, database size, wal generation,database backup, and replication will help you ensure data availability.
2) Optimize Your System – Monitoring helps to identify system bottlenecks and other gaps so you can keep your system running seamlessly. For example, all IO Stats parameters, memory usage, heap cache miss ratio, HOT update ratio, and checkpoint rate can help you optimize the system.
3) Identify Performance Problems – By uncovering performance problems related to bloating, slow running queries, table and index statistics or other areas, you can prevent these issues from becoming bigger problems later. Load average, CPU and IO stats, and PGBouncer are useful checks to identify areas of improvement.
4) Improve Business Processes – Knowing the load, user activity, and other metrics associated with your system helps you to prioritize customer tasks, reporting jobs or downtime. Metrics such as active backends, active connections, and wal production rate can help you improve end user experience.
5) Drive Capacity Planning – Monitoring can help you understand your current system utilization, determine when applications require more disk space, forecast system scaling needs and support your future growth plans. Database size, disk usage, and database folder checks related to wal’s and temp files provide insightful data for planning for future systems.
Often Overlooked Metrics
With so much going on in your datacenter, we tend to focus on important and urgent metrics. But there are a number of dimensions that are important, perhaps not urgent and so frequently neglected. Measures that can dramatically impact your Postgres database and application should also include monitoring the database ecosystem. For example, Pgbouncer, Pgpool, Postgres distributed, EDB Failover manager, EDB Repr manager, EDB replication manager, and Barman tools.
Best practices for monitoring key Postgres database metrics
To stay continuously informed about the ongoing health of your database, consider a cost-effective solution like EDB’s Monitor Only. Monitor Only provides continuous insights into nearly 100 key metrics related to the health of your database – in categories like CPU usage, memory usage, database connections, replication, bloat and it also has an ability to add custom checks which could be very specific to your environment. These metrics are tracked 24x7, so out of bounds parameters and trends can be proactively identified and you can be alerted before they become problems.
This 24x7 option is ideal if you already have the resources, skills, budget, and desire to handle ongoing maintenance and bug fixes for Postgres databases. For those who find it difficult to find or afford expert Postgres talent, EDB Remote DBA provides the same around the clock monitoring plus 24x7 operational staff augmentation—proactively maintaining and providing essential break-fix for your critical databases.
Get ultra-responsive support paired with a special 50% discount on EDB’s Monitor Only!
Because Postgres is open source software, many believe that self-supporting their databases is the only option. EDB Community 360 provides a circle of support protection for your open source Postgres to reduce unplanned downtime and performance issues. And now we’re offering a 50% discount on EDB Monitor Only for one year with a Community 360 subscription. (offer expires September 30, 2023.)*
To learn more about EDB Community 360 PostgreSQL support and receive a 50% discount on EDB’s Monitor-Only contact our EDB sales team today!*
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