As the executive in charge of customer success, we have perhaps the most intimate, on-the-ground understanding of how customers use our product and where they struggle. One request we have received time and again has been a better way to access system- and domain-level metrics and data to help optimize the resources and deployment of a NuoDB implementation.
That’s why we’re excited to announce the availability of NuoDB Insights, now available with Linux versions of NuoDB 4.0 and higher. So without further ado, let’s cover the basics.
Why NuoDB Insights?
NuoDB Insights was developed to optimize database operations and system configuration. With NuoDB Insights, you can better:
- Assess the health of your NuoDB configuration over time
- Identify usage patterns and adjust configuration as needed
- Understand hardware utilization to ensure the correct operating environment
To accomplish that, NuoDB Insights was designed and built with two main goals in mind
- Provide a single, standardized way to collect, share, and act on monitoring data from a NuoDB configuration
- Enable integration with existing monitoring frameworks
Through Insights, database administrators (DBAs) and operations teams get a single aggregated view of a NuoDB Domain and its physical environment (memory, disk, networking) no matter where they run. A NuoDB Domain is a collection of NuoDB hosts that have been provisioned to work together to support NuoDB processes. NuoDB Insights provides visibility into system health, issue identification and resolution, capacity management, and performance management. The tool enables automation of tasks, such as notifications and lifecycle management of a NuoDB configuration.
What Does NuoDB Insights Do?
Specifically, NuoDB Insights collects relevant data from the NuoDB database and systems environment and provides time series metrics and event monitoring data to give DBAs and operations teams visibility and control of a NuoDB Domain. NuoDB Insights is not enabled by default and must be installed before it starts collecting data. Instructions are available on the NuoDB Insights github repository.
NuoDB Insights Components
NuoDB Insights consists of three logical elements: collect, share, and act. The foundation of Insights, the NuoDB Collector, is a process that runs on each NuoDB node and gathers near real-time monitoring and event data on NuoDB and the system it runs on.
NuoDB Insights collects system performance and resource data, data from NuoDB processes, and log files to present a comprehensive view of overall NuoDB database performance and resource consumption.
Among the data collected are life cycle events (starting and stopping of processes), domain information, and data from the NuoDB the SQListener information to get details on the work in the system.
NuoDB Insights includes a pipeline architecture with three distinct stages: Input, Transform, Output. Information is collected by the input stage, then flows to the Transform stage, then flows to the Output stage. NuoDB Insights also has a flexible plugin architecture. Plugins types are “input,” “transform” or “output.” Insights plug-ins have an open architecture, making it possible for anyone to extend the system with additional transformation or integration plug-ins.
NuoDB Insights can send the monitoring data to different destinations via different communication methods. NuoDB Insights output can be stored on-premises or sent to a hosted service. Standard communication using HTTP and https connections are supported.
By supporting standards-based communication, NuoDB Insights allows integration with existing monitoring and management tools such as SUMO Logic, CA Application Performance Management, or SolarWinds. Those tools provide facilities to analyze, visualize, and act on the data.
By default, the data is sent to InfluxDB for further analysis and action. Once stored, the data can be accessed with many tools, for example, to generate dashboards, network diagrams and so forth. NuoDB provides a set of Grafana dashboard panels. The figure below shows an overview of the Insights components.
Below is an overview of the default NuoDB Insights dashboard. The examples below discuss the systems configuration, details on SQL operations, and system resources.
Configuration
NuoDB Insights provides an aggregate view of a running NuoDB configuration mapped in time. Active configuration data helps in gaining control of the lifecycle management in the cloud and on-premise. The data points can be used to assess the health of the configuration, identify usage patterns, and adjust it where needed.
The illustration below shows a view of a NuoDB Domain running two Transaction Engines (TEs) and two Storage Managers (SMs); this is a redundant configuration that will continue to operate even when (for example) an SM is stopped. When information on location is provided, you can see where the machines are running: for example, in your data center and in a cloud environment such as AWS. The line at the bottom of the graph (2) shows that the configuration has been unchanged for the last seven days (3). The dashboard allows you to zoom in and out on the timeline to get a general overview or very detailed data over time.
Database Activity
The graph below shows a more detailed view of what work the database is doing. The panel shows the number of database commits for all system processes. At this time only node 4, a TE, is performing work, processing about 60 commits per second.
The database activity shown below is generated by 93 client connections, across two TEs. The connections to the processes have been stable over time, but are skewed; one TE has 80 of the 93 connections. This configuration works well, however, typically you’d be looking for a more balanced distribution of connections across TEs.
NuoDB Insights is set up to capture NuoDB-specific data, yet generic enough to enrich it with application-provided data for a complete view. Collecting application data points can be done by having the application write data to a log file.
System
NuoDB Insights also helps to understand the utilization of hardware infrastructure components such as CPU, memory, and disk. These data points are collected to help to ensure the correct operating environment for the solution. Key metrics such as disk capacity, memory usage, and CPU consumption are collected.
The graph below displays the CPU usage of a particular node, a TE, for a 25 minute time interval. Typically the performance from a TE is CPU-bound. The data shows that the TE CPU consumption has few fluctuations, and there’s available capacity to do more work.
The graph below shows the memory used by the same TE, over the same timeframe. Memory usage for the node shows little variation providing another data point that the use of system resources is within an acceptable range.
Viewing system data points such as CPU consumption and memory usage complements alerts from the database to help to assess if the hardware configuration supports a healthy environment for NuoDB.
Summary
Distributed systems such as NuoDB increase the need for aggregated monitoring data to give DBAs and operations team visibility in — and control over — a configuration. NuoDB Insights provides a standard way to collect, share, and act on collected NuoDB database and system performance data.. Insights can integrate with existing monitoring tools and provides an open architecture to add additional integration points using plug-ins. The dashboard discussed in this article only shows a small part of the data that is collected by NuoDB Insights, In upcoming releases, we’ll add information on the database activity (TPS, rollbacks, inserts, updates), system data points, and communication data.
