Datadog Database Monitoring extends database visibility to boost query performance

Datadog announced the general availability of Database Monitoring (DBM). With insights into query performance and explain plans, as well as automatic correlation of query metrics with application and infrastructure metrics, Database Monitoring provides engineers and database administrators the visibility they need to quickly find and fix application performance issues that arise from slow running database queries.

Database queries are often the root cause of incidents and application performance issues. When applications make unnecessary queries or fail to use indices, they burden the entire database, causing performance degradation for all applications using the database.

Databases do not store historical query performance metrics, which makes it extremely difficult to understand the context around an issue and identify trends. This becomes even harder as engineers typically need to dig into each database individually to investigate, which prolongs downtime and exacerbates the impact on the customer experience.

Datadog Database Monitoring builds on the existing ability to monitor the general health and availability of the database and underlying infrastructure by allowing users to pinpoint the exact queries that impact application performance and user experience.

With DBM, users can see the performance of database queries, troubleshoot slow queries with detailed execution breakdowns, and analyze historical trends in query latencies and overhead. This allows organizations to unlock improvements not only in database performance, but also in the performance of the upstream applications, APIs, and microservices that the database underpins.

DBM users are also able to automatically correlate query performance data with Datadog infrastructure metrics to easily identify resource bottlenecks. This allows engineers to quickly understand whether performance issues are at the database or infrastructure level, without needing to manually export and reconcile information from multiple, disconnected point solutions. Datadog’s unified data model makes it easy to search and filter information at scale with the same tags that are used everywhere in Datadog.

“Databases underpin today’s digital experiences. Consequently, a disruption in database uptime and performance can quickly have dramatic effects on business operations,” said Renaud Boutet, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Datadog.

“The Datadog platform now enables database administrators and application engineers to detect and act on database issues by sharing the same data. This allows organizations to discover and implement improvements while saving time communicating and reconciling information.”

“The biggest observability challenge we face is proactively monitoring our databases’ performance,” said Chris Seltzer, Engineering Manager, Compass. “Datadog Database Monitoring enables our engineers on both the Product and Infrastructure teams to pinpoint query performance issues and ultimately avoid prolonged downtime that disrupts the end-user experience. The best part is that it’s all within a single tool.”

Datadog DBM delivers deep visibility into databases and enables organizations to:

• Quickly detect and isolate drops in performance. Users can track the performance of normalized queries across their entire fleet of databases, see which types of queries are executed the most and where they run, and get alerts for long running or expensive queries. For each query, they can drill down further to the hosts that are running that query, and leverage log and network information to understand host performance.
• Pinpoint the root cause of performance drops. DBM provides quick access to explain plans, so users can view the sequence of steps that make up a query. This allows them to localize bottlenecks and identify opportunities to optimize performance and resource efficiency.
• Improve and maintain database health, preventing incidents and saving costs. DBM enables organizations to keep historical query performance data for up to three months, so they can understand changes over time and prevent regressions.
• Provide engineers access to database performance telemetry, without compromising data security. DBM offers a centralized view of database performance data, automatically correlated with infrastructure and application metrics, without requiring direct user access to database instances.