SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT performance management software, today announced enhancements to SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) to improve the performance of business-critical applications by optimizing SQL Server, Oracle and other database operations -- whether apps are hosted on premises, in a virtualized environment, or now, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Improve performance of business-critical apps -- wherever they are
Applications are increasingly elemental to business operations, and their performance and fast response time is thus essential to any organization's success. The current set of application performance management (APM) tools focuses on app code, largely ignoring the database, yet in a 2014 Gleanster survey on APM, 88 percent of respondents cited the database as their most common challenge with app performance.

Further, as businesses increasingly embrace cloud and hybrid architecture deployments for hosting their apps, these environments grow more dynamic and complex, so database performance analysis and optimization are more critical than ever to maintain end-user expectations for uptime and performance. 

"The benefits of the cloud -- flexibility, scalability, etc. -- are proven and substantial, so it's no surprise that many businesses are taking advantage of it. However, the performance of cloud-based apps is critically dependent on database performance, and access to performance-optimization tools in the cloud is essential," said Gerardo Dada vice president of product marketing, SolarWinds. "SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer provides IT and DevOps teams with performance-based visibility of their databases wherever they are -- on premises, in virtual environments, or on the AWS Cloud."

Gain immediate visibility into database -- and application -- performance
SolarWinds DPA continuously monitors SQL Server, Oracle, SAP ASE (formerly Sybase®) and DB2® databases in physical, cloud-based and VMware® environments to identify database performance issues that impact end-user response times, isolate root cause, show historical performance trends and dynamic baselines, and correlate metrics with response time and performance.

In its latest version, SolarWinds DPA provides:

• Performance analysis for databases on the AWS Cloud deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers and on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances; SolarWinds DPA is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the AWS Marketplace to enable deployment in minutes
• A single view to monitor hundreds of instances of all major database platforms regardless of deployment methodology, including hybrid (monitoring of on-premises database instances from the cloud, or cloud database instances from on-premises)
• The ability for users to annotate changes to configuration and deployment within the historical timeline and directly associate them with changes to monitored metrics and database response time

"As a long-time user of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, I am excited that it now supports organizations that are deploying apps and infrastructure in the cloud," said Craig Shallahamer, President, OraPub, Inc. "Tons of DBAs can now accelerate deployment and feel confident in the uptime and performance, finally making the cloud both more accessible and less daunting for everyone involved."

SolarWinds DPA also features Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis, giving IT departments additional visibility into how the application performs database operations and where the bottlenecks are, helping them eliminate guesswork, assisting in the reduction of overprovisioning and correction of application performance issues. SolarWinds DPA's agentless architecture is used to analyze performance across development, testing, QA and production environments, enabling collaboration among teams and eliminating silo-based finger pointing.

Other SolarWinds DPA features include storage performance analysis and correlation, providing database admins with unique insight into how storage I/O issues contribute to poor application response time, and metric baselining with alerting and reporting to help pinpoint the root cause of performance issues quickly.

Forward-thinking cloud development teams will also be able to take advantage of the capabilities of SolarWinds DPA together with Librato, which provides real-time operational visibility into cloud applications. Learn more about Librato's capabilities for data collection, advanced manipulation, visualization and alerting of almost anything running on the cloud, see here.

Pricing and Availability
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer pricing starts at $1,995 USD for SQL Server and Oracle Standard Edition, and $3,495 for Oracle Enterprise Edition, DB2 and SAP ASE. SolarWinds offers fully functional two-week trials for both the AWS Marketplace AMI and the downloadable version on the SolarWinds website. Customers will not incur SolarWinds software charges during free two-week trials, however AWS infrastructure charges still apply. All database platforms are licensed by the instance, and pricing includes the first year of maintenance. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website