By Thomas LaRock, Head Geek^TM, SolarWinds

Over the past year, we've seen our world upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes put a spotlight on businesses continuously adapting to changing needs. Distributed workforces are the new normal, and cloud services are the backbone of business operations. Global Workplace Analytics estimates 25-30% of the workforce will continue to work from home for several days a week by the end of 2021, and it's likely this number will continue to grow. In an effort to accommodate this surge, many businesses have accelerated their cloud adoption, with IDC expecting the cloud market to grow to over $1 trillion by 2024. But while cloud adoption is enabling teams to work from home more efficiently, it's not without its challenges. Challenges are embedded in the nuts and bolts of IT, and the only way to ensure optimal productivity is through database and application monitoring.

Traditionally, database and application monitoring tools assumed a system existed on a single server, in a single data center, and in a single location. When IT professionals use legacy tools with new hybrid or cloud infrastructures, they're faced with trying to piece everything together themselves. But new database performance monitoring (DPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) tools provide insights that correlate the information we're given with the task at hand.

Modern Solutions for Modern Problems

Since businesses are learning to adapt, so must the monitoring solutions used to ensure their systems are operating at optimum levels. DPM needs to expand past the capability of only delivering insight into single-node, Earthed databases. As cloud adoption accelerates, IT teams need additional insight into metrics and performance outside of the database engine itself. One way to increase efficiency is to look at the entire workload rather than a query. This will help you gather insights into the entire application stack. By using database performance monitoring software and APM, IT pros have more clear insight into what problems the database is facing.

Latency, traffic, errors, and saturation are the common signals IT pros need for monitoring solutions to help ensure their systems are delivering optimal performance. Understanding how long it takes to receive a response, the number of requests on the network, error rates, and load size are all integral to ensuring smooth operations in databases and cloud applications. For example, clarifying latency issues by pointing out whether slow load times are due to a database issue, or if a company's website is just receiving more traffic than normal. By assessing these four signals, IT teams can pinpoint the general cause of an issue to source the problem, and remedy it, more quickly. And when the problem is identified, monitoring solutions can also go a step further and specify where the problem is.

Modern monitoring solutions eliminate the need to dig through an unmanageable number of queries, which slows down time to resolution. When solutions have a bird's eye view of the workload, IT teams can benefit from greater insight on where the exact issue is rooted in addition to why the problem is occurring. By providing these insights, IT can proactively monitor user experiences to catch problems before they have an impact on productivity, rather than working reactively with traditional monitoring solutions.

Monitoring and the Future of Work

More businesses are adopting cloud-native solutions, which will continue to complexify IT environments. Monitoring is one of the most important ways to ensure all these disparate yet connected systems operate effectively, enabling employees to work productively. As the pandemic continues to shift the ways we think about and do our work, the IT systems that have become the bedrock of our day-to-day work have to shift as well. By monitoring traditional databases and cloud-native applications, we can ensure our work processes are keeping up.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas LaRock, Head Geek, SolarWinds