30
2011
DbaaS Monitoring, A Forgotten Cloud Component?
An article by 
I’ve often thought to myself that when I move a serious database to the cloud, how would I monitor its performance and such. Sounds simple, right — just use whatever I’d use on-premise. Not so fast …
Most on-site database monitoring tools, including MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, require an agent to execute on the host machine. An agent works in the background to collect statistics on all types of things, including:
- host statistics, including CPU, disk I/O, etc.,
- database-specific statistics, including query execution CPU, parsing, and disk I/O, etc.
The problem when moving to the cloud is that you can’t necessarily install an agent on the host that is running your database. It’s even worse with Amazon RDS because you are running MySQL Community Edition, which isn’t licensed to work with MySQL Enterprise Monitor. So even if there was an agent, you’d be out of luck.
But let’s assume that we could get past these problems and you can magically monitor your database’s that are executing atop a virtualized environment like that in Amazon’s cloud. Are you really getting the full picture? You can’t see anything below your host in the virtual environment. How effective are you going to be at tuning a virtualized database without the full picture?
[Cross Posted at Database as a Service]
