One of the questions I hear most often goes something like this: “I have a database monitoring tool already, and WISdom looks like it uses a lot of the same data. How does WISdom compare to the monitoring tool I am using today?”
I have a lot of experience in the SQL Server and general database Monitoring/Observability space, having spent 13 years with the SQL Sentry product, and a couple with SolarWinds DPA as well. Now that I’ve spent 6 months using WISdom daily, and answering that very question for customers, I thought I’d put my thoughts into a post covering that very topic.
The analogy I’ve used to describe those traditional monitoring solutions is to compare them to a microscope. They are outstanding at showing detail, from the server level all the way down to a single execution of a query including the plan in cache at runtime and any parameter values in use for that individual execution. Like the microscope, these solutions are challenged in their ability to zoom out, to see the bigger picture. They generally provide some up/down info and alert aggregation at a global level, but that’s about it.
WISdom, on the other hand, is the spy satellite to traditional monitoring’s microscope. It can see the entire map at one time but can still zoom in to read the license plate on a car or the headline in a newspaper. That’s less detail than the microscope, but it trades off that detail to introduce powerful new capabilities like a unified view of code across the enterprise, dollar costs of code and data, and a more proactive posture.
Looking at code at the enterprise level
How many pieces of code do you have that run on more than one server or maybe even ALL of your servers? This is especially valuable in models that spin up a database per customer, or a database per store, but it’s equally helpful in seeing things running in Development, QA, and Production environments all together. WISdom makes it easy to see both the total impact of that query that runs everywhere across the enterprise, as well as spot things like “this query is way more efficient in QA than it is in Production with the larger dataset” or “this runs great in our small client but is inefficient in our top 10 largest.”
WISdom also provides a more impactful way of looking at database contention issues like blocking and deadlocks. Rather than showing each event individually, WISdom aggregates the same events occurring over and over to identify the real bottlenecks and separate the one-offs. Think about a map of city streets with a traffic overlay; the traffic jams start at the same places almost every single day, right? Databases tend to work in much the same way. By showing which objects see the greatest contention and showing the impact, WISdom allows teams to prioritize effort in ways that provide maximum impact effectively.
Look at the big picture: Find the contention hotspots in the environment quickly and easily.
Turning IOps and CPU time into Dollars and Cents
DBAs and Developers have always used traditional monitoring solutions to look at code performance in terms of IO and CPU resources; these are valid and useful metrics. The place where those technical metrics fall flat is with non-technical business stakeholders. If I tell the head of sales that their new feature isn’t ready to ship this sprint because it requires extra performance optimization or it will take trillions of IOs per year, that probably doesn’t mean much. What we need is a common language everyone understands and can relate to, like financial costs. If I tell the same business stakeholder that their feature needs another sprint for optimization because it will save the company a million dollars a year, that’s a much more effective message! WISdom provides both technical and financial metrics for the costs of code and data automatically.
WISdom also grades those high-cost queries on efficiency, making it easy to identify the technical debt in production environments and make sure new code is efficient prior to production deployment.
Look at costs and efficiency to direct tuning efforts to the right code the first time.
Progressing from Reactive to Proactive
Legacy database monitoring solutions excel in a reactive role: providing alerts and doing postmortem root cause analyses. These are important capabilities to have, to be sure – you should always have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. That said, you don’t use the fire extinguisher to cook your dinner, clean up after, or reorganize the kitchen. In addition to code optimization, WISdom powers other, more proactive uses, for the data collected from the servers.
For as long as I’ve been in the database world, and probably much longer, monitoring data has been used to drive alerts to the DBA team and others to resolve issues as they come up. This is a critical capability. WISdom is also capable of generating these alerts, but that’s still a reactive capability. There is a ton of data available from the servers, instances, and databases that can drive more proactive behavior. When things aren’t on fire, how do you prioritize the effort to make the environment perform better, be more stable, cost less, and be more secure? Enter WISdom’s Opportunities.
Less urgent than an alert – Opportunities are a set of rules that detect sub-optimal configurations, contention, and opportunities for optimization. While I wouldn’t wake my DBA up in the middle of the night for these things, they are an excellent way to drive continuous improvement between releases and fire drills. They are categorized by priority – do the high-priority items first – and by the area of impact they will have: Performance, Availability, Stability, Security, or Operational Efficiency. A report on closed opportunities is also a great way for the DBAs to report back to the business about all the additional value they are bringing between war room calls. Cloud migrations are an incredibly commonly discussed (and contentious) topic in databases today. There are some great capabilities available in the cloud, but also the potential for massive costs. In my experience, the basic lift-and-shift from a VM on-prem to IaaS will result in cost explosions without significant optimization! WISdom’s migration wizard makes it easy to estimate the costs of a right-sized move and even recommends optimal machine shapes and storage configurations based on the performance data collected. This information can certainly be used to move that workload as-is but is often a great justification for optimization prior to the move! For workloads already in the cloud, the migration wizard can also be used to right-size instances that are now over capacity – saving on both IaaS costs and SQL Server licensing.
Code isn’t the only place to find efficiency. WISdom also looks at your server, instance, and database
settings for Opportunities.
Where do we go from here?
If what we’re doing here at Fortified sounds interesting or directly addresses some of the issues you have with your current SQL Server toolset, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to walk you through a deep dive into WISdom’s capabilities and even get a trial set up in your environment to try some of these things for yourself.
Still not sure? That’s okay! If you’re interested in learning more, we also host technology roundtables and public forums on everything from SQL Server performance to FinOps for Database and even professional development topics. We’d love for you to join us for one of those sessions!
About the Author
Scott Fallen, Head of Data & Cloud Solutions
Scott is a Solutions Engineer at Fortified with over a decade of experience in driving database performance, scalability, and reliability. He has a strong track record of building and mentoring teams, leading successful proof-of-concept efforts for large enterprises, and serving as a trusted advisor at both in-person and virtual industry events. Passionate about helping organizations optimize their data environments, Scott thrives on solving complex technical challenges and improving the quality of life for the teams he supports.