Use of database monitoring tools rises to record high, monitoring survey reveals

Over three quarters (79%) of database professionals are now using either a paid-for or in-house monitoring tool, a survey from Redgate Software has shown. This is an increase of 10 percentage points from the same survey last year and, at the same time, the 86% satisfaction rate with paid-for monitoring tools is also an all-time high, up 18 percentage points on the previous year.

The increase is partly down to the ongoing growth and complexity of database estates, with IDC predicting the installed base of storage capacity will increase by 240% between 2021 and 2025, and virtually every business sector seeing a big shift to the cloud.

The State of Database Monitoring Survey Insights Report

It’s also, however, down to the changing demands from organizations, with the survey showing they expect the efficiency and performance of growing estates to be maintained, security and compliance concerns to be fully addressed, and the visibility of monitoring data to be widened beyond Database Administrators (DBAs) to developers and IT teams.

This in turn, increases the pressure on DBAs, with many reporting they are expected to do more with less. Hence the rise in the use of database monitoring tools, which appear to reduce frustration, save time and allow DBAs to focus their efforts on contributing value to the business elsewhere.

As Kathi Kellenberger, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and editor of the technical journal for data professionals, Simple Talk, explains: “While a DBA could be responsible for just one SQL Server instance, typically it’s dozens and could be thousands too. Without a good monitoring tool in place, the DBA will constantly be putting out fires instead of learning about and taking advantage of new features, tuning poorly performing queries, planning for new systems and contributing to more worthwhile projects.”

A good monitoring tool can give a DBA and the wider IT team a single pane of glass to watch for issues on all the SQL Server instances they manage, both on-premises and in the cloud, provide alerts when problems do arise, and drill down to the cause in minutes rather than the hours it would take with manual monitoring.

Redgate examines concerns like these in the latest insights report from the monitoring survey, ‘The value of a monitoring tool for the entire organization’. It extracts and examines data from the survey about how organizations across the globe are currently monitoring their databases, how satisfied they are, and what causes them the biggest, most problematic issues.

The fourth global State of Database Monitoring Survey was conducted in the summer of 2021 and received responses from over 2,500 IT professionals in every business sector about the difficulties they face at a time of transformation and change. The monitoring team at Redgate has already reported on how data professionals are coping with rapidly growing server estates and is now looking deeper into security and compliance challenges, and the complexity of cloud and hybrid estates.

Download a free copy of the full insights report, and contact Redgate for more on how its compliant Database DevOps solutions can help teams deliver value quicker while keeping data safe.

About Redgate Software
Redgate makes ingeniously simple software used by over 800,000 IT professionals around the world and is the leading Database DevOps solutions provider. Redgate’s philosophy is to design highly usable, reliable tools which elegantly solve the problems developers and DBAs face every day and help them to adopt compliant database DevOps. As well as streamlining database development and preventing the database being a bottleneck, this helps organizations introduce data protection by design and by default. As a result, more than 100,000 companies use Redgate tools, including 91% of those in the Fortune 100.

Media Contacts
Meghana Shendrikar
Allison+Partners for Redgate Software
[email protected]