By: Kyle Wassink
Dashboards in vRealize Operations provide a phenomenal way to customize how you display information about your environment. As you add management packs to gain visibility into the databases in your environment, some dashboards are provided out-of-the-box. These dashboards provide a great start to understanding both your database health and performance, but also see the underlying VMware layers that your virtualized databases rely on. Below are some dashboards provided in various database management packs that you can use and customize to your use cases.
#1: Oracle Queries
Part of the Oracle Database integration found in the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite, the Oracle Queries dashboard provides DBA’s and IT Ops with visibility into query performance and problems. The top row of the dashboard lists all of your monitored Oracle Database instances on the left, including the health, risk, and efficiency badges provided by the advanced analysis vRealize Operations performs automatically. When you select one of the rows, the “Slowest Queries” widget to the right populates with queries, ordered by the slowest average execution time.
Figure 1: Top row of the Oracle Queries dashboard.
The bottom half of the dashboard displays a heatmap on the left and additional performance information on the right. The heatmap displays all queries on all Oracle Database instances you are monitoring, with a default configuration that sizes each “box” in the heatmap based on how many times the query is run. The color represents the average execution time, with red being the longer running queries. This is a great visual way to quickly identify problematic queries. If you have a large “box” (a frequently run query) that is orange or red (long execution time), something might be wrong with the SQL statement or database performance.
Clicking on any of the “boxes” in the heatmap will display the basic information (Database instance, average time, SQL text, etc.) in the “Selected Query” widget. The bottom right widget displays information such as how many rows were processed, average call time, and how much data was read and written during query execution.
Figure 2: The bottom half of the Oracle Queries dashboard.
#2 Microsoft SQL Environment Overview
The MS SQL Environment Overview dashboard is part of the Microsoft SQL Database integration found in Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite. This dashboard provides insight into Microsoft SQL alerts, KPI’s, disk metric, query metrics, health, and more from a single dashboard. If issues are found, it’s easy to drill into the selected SQL Server instance and begin troubleshooting.
If you have multiple instances, you can select which Microsoft SQL Server you want to view the information for, and all the widgets will update to display the information about that instance. Some information displayed includes SQL CPU usage, buffer cache hit ratio, user connections, used disk pace trends, and disk read/write trends.
Figure 3: The MS QL Environment Overview. A heatmap widget and health history widget are not pictured, but would be found below the Disk and Query Metric widgets.
#3 MongoDB IOPS
The MongoDB IOPS is also part of the True Visibility Suite from Blue Medora and provides a way to quickly find your MongoDB Nodes. Once you select a node in the upper left widget, the underlying VMware Virtual Machine and Datastore (if virtualized) will be identified in the bottom left of the dashboard. The right half of the dashboard shows KPI metric trends at each layer, quickly highlighting any performance spikes occurring. If you find a problem at any of the layers, you can easily dig into the problem resource using the “Show Details” button in the widgets.
Figure 4: The MongoDB IOPS dashboard shows metric trends at the MongoDB Node, VMware Virtual Machine, and VMware Datastore layers.
If you enjoyed these, be sure to check out the Top 3 Storage Dashboards post! For information on gaining vROps visibility into your databases, visit Blue Medora True Visibility Suite webpage for more information.
