Monitoring a database instance

Question

Anyone have any idea? And any open source sofware which also seens to perform this kind of functionality?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you need, but would http://www.nagios.org/ be enough for your purposes?

Answer 2

What database? What platform?

If it's MySQL, there are many monitoring applications around - for example, the MySQL GUI Tools include a Health Monitor widget (on OS X)

Also, phpMyAdmin shows statistics from the MySQL server.

You could also write a simple script that connects to the database, executes some trivial command and check it returns a known value. If it doesn't, send an alert somewhere.

Answer 3

This depends a lot on what kind of database and what you're monitoring for.
Things you might be monitorring for:

• Is the database still up?
• How heavily loaded is the database?
• Deadlocks?
• Security events?
• Exceptions?

Perhaps you could edit your question to fill in a bit more info?

Answer 4

Have you looked at OpenNMS?

Answer 5

You might want to look at cacti (http://www.cacti.net/what_is_cacti.php) which is general purpose tool for giving graphical representations of any type of data. We use it to see how healthy our webservers and mysql servers are. But it does not have any alert system (in case something critical happens and you need to take immediate action) as far as I know for which you might want to consider nagios as pointed by someone already. See the screenshots below for mysql below to have an idea. The screenshots show various graphs for showing various states of mysql server over a period of time:

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/05/25/screenshots-of-improved-mysql-cacti-templates/

IF your database is other than mysql then google for "your_database_name cacti" to find templates for your database.

Answer 6

I'm not sure is I understand your question but I use nagios to monitor just about anything on my server...

Answer 7

What about Nagios? Here are some recommended scripts for MySQL, MS-SQL, Oracle: http://www.consol.de/opensource/nagios/

Answer 8

+1 to the suggestion you give us some more details as to what you want to monitor and you're platform.

I use Hyperic and am largely happy

OpenNMS I also looked at, same with Nagios, I'd suggest dowbnloading the 3 of them, or doing a little reading about them, and then picking one and going for it. Hyperic in my opinion was a lot easier to get implemented than Nagios, OpenNMS I didn't try for my self. Those 3 are as far as I know it the big open source monitorring solutions.