Database Performance Monitoring Gets Easier with Ignite 8.0

In the past, Confio Software’s Ignite focused on response-time monitoring, which lets you easily see what your applications are waiting on and how long they’ve been waiting, but it didn’t provide routine performance stats. However, the company’s most recent release, Ignite 8.0, extends its performance-monitoring functionality by not only collecting response-time information but also performance data in the form of server-health resources (which of your server resources are running at capacity), query statistics (which queries are running and how long are they taking), and real-time sessions (which users are on and are they blocking other users), giving you a comprehensive database monitoring solution.

The latest version of the product extends Ignite’s performance data warehouse capabilities to include what Confio Software calls “Performance Intelligence.” These features include historical trend analysis, data correlation, expert advice, and an alarm trail. With the historical trend analysis feature, you can look at what’s happening right now and determine if it has happened before and if it’s tied to a specific event. With its new data correlation functionality, Ignite ties in response time with health and session data to show you how the server’s health and activity are affecting end users and their queries.

Ignite’s expert advice functionality “puts right up front the specific problems that are most important on each specific day,” according to Don Bergal, Confio Software's COO. “So in the user display on the dashboard, the user sees expert advice that is basically the same conclusion that one of our DBA experts has come to saying ‘This is the most important query and why.’ And so an example might be ‘This query is taking up 37 percent of your response time, is using up 45 percent of the server resource, and it’s hung up because of a specific commit and sync issue in the instance.’” And the product’s alarm trail points you directly to the root cause of problems. “Right up front we tell the user, with color-coded alarms, what are the most important problems and what should you be looking at,” says Bergal. “And then, just by having them click on those colored icons, they can navigate through the tool to the lowest level and see the exact root cause of the problem.” All these features work together to help make the answers to your performance problems more obvious.

This product also offers two new dashboards: a Trend dashboard and a Current dashboard. The Trend dashboard shows you monthly response-time trends, and it offers advice on today’s problem queries. The Current dashboard shows you the response time in the last hour and real-time sessions and blockers. In addition, it gives you 12 options for viewing your server resources.

Ignite 8.0 is agentless and can monitor SQL Server 2008, 2005, and 2000 systems from one Ignite instance. You can learn more about Ignite 8.0 at www.confio.com.