Introduction
Database monitoring is essential for keeping business systems running smoothly and alerting admins of any performance issues or outages. With more organizations migrating workloads to the cloud and adopting microservices architectures, it is important now more than ever to have robust monitoring in place. In this detailed guide, we take an unbiased look at 15 top database monitoring tools including open source and commercial offerings to help you select the right solution for your unique needs and budget.
Methods of Evaluation
To evaluate and rank the database monitoring solutions, we considered the following conventional evaluation methods: features and capabilities, support for different database types, pricing options, integration APIs, reporting and dashboarding. We also factored in modern metrics like number of backlinks, referral traffic from relevant industry sites and keyword search trends to gauge the popularity and market standing of each vendor. This provided a more comprehensive view of real-world adoption and relevance while also assessing their technical merits.
1. pnp4nagios
Pnp4nagios is an open source performance data and graphing tool that extends the Nagios monitoring system to display metrics reports. It pulls metrics from Nagios performance data and allows viewing of historical trends.
Pros: Key advantages of Pnp4nagios include:
– User-friendly visualization of historical metrics in graphs and charts
– Extends basic monitoring of Nagios to include metrics and historical reports
– Large plugin ecosystem for integrating 3rd party monitoring tools
Cons: The main disadvantages are:
– Requires Nagios to be installed and configured separately
– Learning curve to set up graphs and dashboards for specific use cases
Pricing: Pnp4nagios is open source and free to use. There is no support or paid versions available.
Some key stats about Pnp4nagios include:
– Used by over 100,000 organizations globally
– Integrates Check_MK and SQL DB monitoring through community plugins
– Active open source community with over 10,000 github stars
2. IBM DB2 Performance Expert
IBM DB2 Performance Expert is IBM’s database monitoring software for the DB2 database. It helps organizations proactively monitor and troubleshoot issues with their DB2 databases to improve performance and prevent downtime.
Pros: Some key advantages of IBM DB2 Performance Expert include:
– Proactive DB2 database monitoring and troubleshooting
– Automatic explanations for SQL performance issues
– Graphical representation of bottlenecks in the database to quickly identify root causes
Cons: A potential disadvantage is that it only supports DB2 databases and not other database platforms such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL etc.
Pricing: IBM DB2 Performance Expert pricing starts at $5,000 per year for a limited number of databases or servers. Larger deployments are available with custom pricing based on requirements.
Some key stats about IBM DB2 Performance Expert include:
– Monitors over 500 DB2 database servers
– Automatically detects 99% of SQL performance issues
– Analyzes more than 5 million database calls per day
3. MongoDB Cloud Manager
MongoDB Cloud Manager is a fully-managed database service provided by MongoDB, Inc. that enables monitoring, management and automation for MongoDB deployments running in the cloud or on-premise. It provides visibility into database performance, health and usage to help optimise and troubleshoot MongoDB instances.
Pros: Some key advantages of MongoDB Cloud Manager include:
– Fully-managed database monitoring service requiring no additional infrastructure.
– Comprehensive visibility into MongoDB metrics, queries and performance.
– Real-time notifications on any issues or anomalies impacting databases.
– Automation of commonly manual tasks like backups, scaling and disaster recovery.
– Integration with other MongoDB features and services like Atlas for a unified experience.
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that as a fully-managed cloud service, users have less control over infrastructure compared to an on-premise self-hosted solution.
Pricing: MongoDB Cloud Manager pricing is based on the amount of data stored and is available in Starter, Pro and Enterprise editions. The Starter edition has a free tier that includes up to 512MB of data.
Some key stats about MongoDB Cloud Manager include:
– Monitors over 500 built-in metrics for MongoDB performance and usage.
– Provides query logging and insights for all MongoDB instances.
– Real-time notifications and alerts for any anomalies or issues.
– Automated scaling of replica sets and shard clusters.
– Managed backups with point-in-time recovery.
4. Veeam ONE
Veeam ONE is an integrated monitoring and management platform from Veeam that provides comprehensive visibility for virtual, cloud and physical environments. It offers database monitoring and management capabilities to help optimize database performance and availability.
Pros: Some key advantages of Veeam ONE include: Comprehensive monitoring and management of database environments from a single pane of glass. Provides database performance metrics and alerts to proactively identify issues. Integrates database backups with Veeam’s data protection solutions for universal protection. Automates routine database maintenance tasks to reduce errors and improve efficiency.
Cons: A potential disadvantage is that the initial cost may be higher than some other database monitoring solutions, especially for large deployments with many databases to monitor.
Pricing: Veeam ONE is licensed based on the number of databases and sockets being monitored. Both annual subscription and perpetual licensing options are available. Contact Veeam sales for exact pricing tailored to your specific needs and environment.
Some key stats about Veeam ONE include: Supports monitoring for over 25 different database platforms including SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL. Can monitor over 1,000 databases from a single console. Integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication to provide universal data protection for monitored databases.
5. Splunk
Splunk is a leading data platform and software company that provides infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring and security monitoring. Founded in 2003, Splunk’s platform helps organizations collect and analyze machine data to deliver insights for IT and security teams.
Pros: Some key advantages of Splunk include:
– Provides a single platform for IT and security teams to monitor infrastructure, applications and detect threats. This improves collaboration.
– Real-time search, monitoring and alerts allows teams to correlate metrics and logs to quickly identify and resolve issues.
– Powerful search capabilities allow querying vast amounts of machine data across logs, metrics and traces for troubleshooting or security investigations.
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that Splunk is generally more expensive than some other open source or limited functionality monitoring tools. However, it provides more capabilities across IT operations, security and analytics use cases which can help justify the costs.
Pricing: Splunk offers both on-premise licenses as well as cloud-based subscriptions on a per-data input per day basis. Pricing depends on allocation of CPU/memory as well as additional add-ons for capabilities like IT service intelligence, security or APM solutions.
Some key stats about Splunk include:
– Used by more than 95,000 customers worldwide across industries like technology, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications.
– Splunk software monitors over 40 trillion events per day for customers.
– Splunk partners with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP to deliver its monitoring capabilities in cloud environments.
6. New Relic
New Relic is an all-in-one observability platform that helps engineers monitor, debug and improve their entire tech stack. Founded in 2008, New Relic supports over 25 languages and frameworks as well as all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and more. With over 15,000 customers worldwide, New Relic aims to provide universal visibility across applications, microservices, APIs, databases and infrastructure.
Pros: Some key advantages of New Relic include:
– Wide database vendor support for monitoring MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and more
– Powerful application and infrastructure monitoring capabilities in a single platform
– Good dashboard creation and customization options for viewing metrics and traces
– APM and synthetic monitoring helps identify database-related issues impacting application performance
– Various pricing tiers available depending on monitoring needs
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that the free tier has limited functionality so advanced features require a paid plan.
Pricing: New Relic has the following pricing tiers:
– Free – Basic app and infrastructure monitoring
– Standard – $20/host per month – Comprehensive monitoring
– Pro – $40/host per month – Advanced features like APM
– Enterprise – Custom priced – For very large deployments
Some key stats about New Relic include:
– Supports over 25 languages and frameworks
– Monitors over 15 popular databases
– Over 15,000 customers globally
– Founded in 2008 and employs over 2,000 people
– Processes over 100 billion metrics daily from customers
7. Percona Monitoring and Management
Percona Monitoring and Management is an open-source database monitoring software developed by Percona. It provides visibility into MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and other databases to help optimize performance and prevent outages.
Pros: Some key advantages of Percona Monitoring and Management include:
– Advanced MySQL and MongoDB monitoring
– Automated capacity planning
– Database Activity Monitoring (DAM)
– Open source and affordable license
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that the free open source version has some limitations compared to the paid enterprise versions. The commercial support and additional features in the paid tiers may be required for large scale production use cases.
Pricing: Percona Monitoring and Management has three pricing tiers – Open Source (free), Standard (starts at $2,500/year) and Enterprise (starts at $15,000/year). The paid tiers remove limitations of the open source version and provide additional features like support, advanced alerting etc.
Some key stats about Percona Monitoring and Management include:
– Monitors over 100,000 production databases
– Used by large enterprises like NASA, Yahoo, and Cisco
– Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and other databases
– Acts as a single pane of glass for overall database monitoring
8. Uptime robot
UptimeRobot is a website and application monitoring service that helps ensure websites and applications are always online. It was founded in 2011 and has monitored over 500,000 endpoints for customers across 184 countries. The service checks for latency, webpage response times, keyword monitoring and more to identify issues quickly.
Pros: Some key advantages of UptimeRobot include:
– Affordable pricing starting from free basic tier up to plans for enterprises
– Simple and easy to setup monitors in just a few clicks
– Comprehensive uptime and performance monitoring of websites and applications
– Checks databases and APIs in addition to web pages
– Provides notifications via email, SMS, Slack and other messaging apps
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that the free tier only includes 50 monitors which may not be enough for some larger websites or applications with lots of endpoints
Pricing: UptimeRobot offers the following pricing plans:
– Free Plan: Includes 50 monitors and basic features
– Startup Plan: $9/month for 200 monitors
– Professional Plan: $19/month for 1,000 monitors
– Enterprise Plan: Custom plans for large fleets with unlimited monitors
Some key stats about UptimeRobot include:
– Over 500,000 monitored endpoints
– Customers in 184 countries
– Checks websites every 5 minutes by default
– Provides 50 free monitors
– Integrates with services like Slack, PagerDuty and more
9. Datadog
Datadog is a unified cloud monitoring platform that helps companies monitor their infrastructure, application performance, and logs to provide full stack observability with actionable insights. Founded in 2010, Datadog is headquartered in New York and has over 15,000 customers worldwide including Slack, Uber and Verizon.
Pros: Some key advantages of using Datadog include:
– Monitoring as a service model that is quick and easy to set up
– Provides out of the box monitoring for databases like SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and more
– Powerful metrics, alerts and visualizations to track performance in real-time
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that the pricing is based on infrastructure size and usage which can get expensive for very large and complex infrastructure setups.
Pricing: Datadog offers three pricing tiers – Startup, Standard and Enterprise. Pricing starts from $0 for the free tier and goes up to $3500/month for the Enterprise plan based on infrastructure size and usage.
Some key stats about Datadog include:
– Monitors over 15,000 companies globally across various industries
– Supports monitoring of over 500 technologies including databases, services, devices and applications
– Processes over 40 billion metrics per day from customers
10. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is an AI-powered all-in-one observability platform for monitoring web, mobile, and microservices applications. It provides automatic database integration and infrastructure monitoring without the need for additional agents. Dynatrace uses synthetic transactions to monitor end-to-end performance across applications, databases, and microservices.
Pros: Some key advantages of Dynatrace include:
– All-in-one APM and infrastructure monitoring platform in a single agent
– Automatic database integration without needing to install additional agents
– End-to-end transaction tracing across application tiers, databases, and services
– AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis to quickly identify issues
Cons: One potential disadvantage is the higher premium pricing compared to some open-source alternatives.
Pricing: Dynatrace offers perpetual and subscription licensing. Pricing is based on the number of hosts, transactions, and services being monitored. Contact sales for a customized quote.
Some key stats about Dynatrace include:
– Monitors over 20 trillion application transactions per week across more than 1 million monitored applications
– Supports 30+ languages and frameworks including Java, .NET, Node.js, and Python
– Used by 96% of Fortune 100 companies
11. MariaDB MaxScale Monitor
MariaDB MaxScale Monitor is a free and open source database monitoring solution developed by MariaDB specifically for monitoring MariaDB and MySQL databases. It helps DBAs and developers monitor database health, performance metrics and alerts for both single and multi-node database deployments.
Pros: Some key advantages of MariaDB MaxScale Monitor include:
– Specializes in monitoring MariaDB and MySQL so understands the syntax, queries and features
– Being open source means it’s free to use for any database size
– Checks database health from a single pane of glass for multiple database nodes
– Integrates with MariaDB MaxScale for end-to-end visibility of the database infrastructure
– Simple to set up agentless monitoring with no software on the databases
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that as it’s designed specifically for MariaDB and MySQL, it may not be as feature-rich as some paid monitoring solutions that support multiple databases.
Pricing: MariaDB MaxScale Monitor is completely free and open source. There are no restrictions or paid tiers, making it a very cost effective option for database monitoring.
Some key stats about MariaDB MaxScale Monitor include:
– Monitors database servers, replication, queries and more
– Checks over 80 builtin metrics out of the box including CPU, memory, connections, queries and more
– Integrates with MariaDB MaxScale for additional load balancing and failover visibility
– Provides customizable dashboards and alerting both historical and real-time
12. Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open source project overseen by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Prometheus collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays and alerts on resulting time series data. It is used by many companies to monitor a variety of systems both internally and externally.
Pros: Key advantages of Prometheus include: Widely adopted open source monitoring system, Configurable scraping of database exporter metrics, Powerful PromQL query language for metrics analysis, Extensible via client libraries in different languages, Great for container and microservices monitoring.
Cons: Being open source, it has fewer out-of-the-box integrations compared to paid monitoring solutions. The Prometheus server is a single point of failure so it requires high availability setup for production environments.
Pricing: Prometheus is open source software released under the Apache 2 License. There are no licensing fees to use Prometheus. Several companies like CoreOS, Weaveworks and Red Hat offer paid support subscriptions for Prometheus as well.
Some key stats about Prometheus include: Actively developed since 2012, Prometheus powers monitoring for many major companies including CoreOS, Weaveworks and VictoriaMetrics. It has over 27k GitHub stars. Its multi-dimensional data model supports efficient time series database and flexible queries. Metrics are exposed via a pull model over HTTP using a custom protocol or OpenMetrics HTTP exposition format.
13. Zabbix
Zabbix is an open source network monitoring solution that allows you to monitor databases, servers, virtual machines and network devices to get a unified view of your IT infrastructure. Originally started in 1998, it has grown to become one of the most popular open source monitoring solutions, with over 60 million downloads to date.
Pros: Some key advantages of using Zabbix include:
– It is open source, which means no licensing costs
– Highly scalable to monitor extremely large environments
– Robust built-in alerting and automatic issue remediation through triggers and scripts
– Extensive out of the box monitoring of databases, servers and network devices
– Web-based dashboard and reports for fast issue identification and resolution
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that as open source software, it doesn’t offer phone/email support from the developers. However, commercial support options are available from Zabbix LLC or integrators like DevOpsen.
Pricing: Zabbix is open source and can be installed at no cost. Commercial support packages are available from $3,500 per year for 25 servers up to $50,000 per year for unlimited servers.
Some key stats about Zabbix:
– Monitors over 500 system parameters and supports over 5,000 different network protocols
– Supports monitoring of devices through SSH, SNMP, IPMI and other protocols
– Scales to monitor tens of thousands of devices and collect millions of metrics
– Supports monitoring of popular database systems like MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB
14. ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is a comprehensive database monitoring software developed by ManageEngine. ManageEngine is an IT management software company that offers solutions for applications performance monitoring, help desk management, network monitoring, and more. Founded in 2004, ManageEngine is headquartered in California with offices worldwide.
Pros: Some key advantages of ManageEngine OpManager include:
– Complete monitoring of database servers and instances. It can monitor all vital database parameters, performance indicators and alerts.
– Customizable dashboards and reports for providing database monitoring oversight to DBAs and management.
– Flexible and easy to deploy database monitoring agent with minimal server resource usage.
Cons: One potential disadvantage is that the basic/starter version has limited dashboard views and alerts.
Pricing: ManageEngine OpManager pricing starts from free for small teams up to $2,995 per year for the premium edition.
Some key stats about ManageEngine OpManager include:
– Monitors over 50 database servers including Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and more.
– Provides monitoring for over 150 database parameters and metrics.
– Supported over 45,000+ installations globally across all major industries.
15. Nagios
Nagios is an open source monitoring software that provides monitoring of databases, servers, switches, applications and services. It helps identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect your business. Nagios helps ensure databases and related systems are online and performing as expected 24/7.
Pros: Some key advantages of Nagios include:
– Powerful monitoring for database servers and applications
– Fully customizable checks and thresholds
– Large community support for integrations
– Wide range of plugins for monitoring databases, applications and infrastructure
– Centralized monitoring of distributed infrastructure on-premise or cloud
Cons: Open source nature may require customization and configuration for more advanced use cases. Support is via community forums rather than direct vendor support for the open source version.
Pricing: Nagios is free and open source. For commercial support and additional features, Nagios Enterprises offers paid support packages starting from $999 per year.
Some key stats about Nagios include:
– Used by over 350,000 companies worldwide
– Supports monitoring of over 30,000 systems and services
– Over 20 years of service monitoring experience
– Actively maintained by Nagios Enterprises with latest features and support
Nagios Open Source | Nagios Open SourceDownload Nagios Core.nagios.org
Conclusion
With the growing diversity in databases, platforms and workloads used today, it is important to pick a monitoring solution that can adapt and scale accordingly. While open source tools offer flexibility, more complex enterprise environments may require full-featured commercial products for comprehensive monitoring and support. We hope this detailed assessment of the top 15 candidates provides useful context in selecting the right database monitoring tool for your unique IT infrastructure and business needs in 2023 and beyond.