Automation of Best Practice Enforcement

The first thing I like about the Monitoring and Advisory Service is that it lets me easily automate the enforcement of all key MySQL standards for security, performance, configuration, and more. This is done through the following steps:

1. Select what MySQL servers you want to monitor through the Enterprise Dashboard.
2. Select what Advisors/best practice rules you want to run against your monitored servers.
3. Schedule how often you want the Advisors/rules to run against each server (or group of servers).
4. That’s it.

Once I walk through those few steps, the Monitoring and Advisory Service takes over in a set-it-and-forget-it manner and my servers are now all monitored and protected.

The thing I really like about this approach is that I can set up the service to protect two hundred servers as easily as I can just two servers. Using the web-based dashboard, I can create groups of servers so I can manage them in mass. I simply select a group of servers that I want to monitor, select the Advisors and rules I want to enforce against that group, select a schedule that determines the frequency with which the Advisors run and poll each server, and I’m done.

Figure 2 – Selecting the Security Advisor to run against selected MySQL servers

Changing or altering a standing monitoring schedule is easy too. In the end, the automated approach that the Monitoring and Advisory Service offers is one that lets me focus on important things other than worrying if a particular server has an issue I need to deal with. Which leads me to the next thing I like about the Monitoring and Advisory Service…

Where do I need to spend my Time?

When I walked in every morning to my DBA job, there was one major question that needed to be answered: Is there anything that immediately requires my attention? Maybe a database server is down or a server is experiencing a major slowdown that’s about to impact a key application. The problem was, I had lots of servers that were my responsibility so visiting each one individually could take up the entire morning.

I really like the fact that the Monitoring and Advisory Service takes the guesswork out of answering the question above. It does this through a smart “Heat Chart” (see Figure 3) that is displayed on the Enterprise Dashboard that provides an at-a-glance method for determining if any MySQL servers are experiencing an outage or performance issues. The Heat Chart lets me instantly know where I need to focus my time and attention in regard to the MySQL servers I manage. The first two columns of the Heat Chart show the up/down status of each agent that is monitoring a server as well as the server status. This means you will immediately know if you have any down production systems.