[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody. My name is Gordon Cornelius. I'm one of the Senior Sales Directors here at Quest Software when it comes to the database performance monitoring space. And with me today is Mark Gowdy, who's also one of the Senior Directors when it comes to our pre-sales consulting team.
The topic of the discussion that Mark and I are going to have are just really things to consider when speaking to our clients when it comes to database observability and really different types of solutions out there that can best fit their needs and areas of concern. So introduce yourself, Mark.
Yeah. Thanks, Gordon. I'm looking forward to our chat today. As Gordon said, really the key topic for us is helping customers understand the needs around database monitoring and observability tools, especially when looking out there. There's a lot of offerings that one can leverage. And so how do you know you've made the right choice? How do you know that you've picked the right solution for your needs? So hopefully today we'll have a conversation about some of those things that once you think about and you've got a few tips at the end of the session that will allow you to feel more confident in your decision.
Certainly. And there's been some industry studies that came out that said 87% of clients out there already have a solution in place that gives some visibility into the database environment. So they can proactively or reactively solve these performance issues. But there are a lot of solutions out there.
So with that being said, we're going to try to break these up into three main components. The first is going to be more of your enterprise style monitor, your application performance monitor. From there, we're going to break it down into more of those niche single silo database performance and diagnostics solutions. And then obviously with the transition to cloud, we now are seeing a lot of solutions that the cloud native vendors are going to be supplying you and offering you to give visibility there.
And again, they all have their strengths, but they also have all their own pitfalls. And obviously there's going to be some areas of concern where really when you want to select the right tool for you, you should take all these factors into consideration.
So Mark, let's start our discussion off today with those enterprise class monitors that you see out there. Really they go a mile wide across the environment but really just an inch deep, don't offer some of the granularity you may need as a database professional.
Yeah, absolutely. Those solutions have a place in everyone's IT infrastructure toolbox. They are important at getting that sort of wide view of all of the components and how they interact. The challenge you face, especially with areas like database, is you miss out on exactly what's happening there. I like to think about this as the inside out view versus the outside in view.
When you're looking at an enterprise solution or even looking at an application performance monitoring solution, you're looking at the database from the outside. And so for example, you may see from your solutions that the database is taking about 10 seconds for a particular request. What you actually don't get from those solutions is what is actually happening inside the database. You don't understand is that 10 seconds from gate to gate actually 10 seconds in the database? And if so, why? Having a solution that allows you to be more focused for the needs of the database professionals is critical.
One of the things that we like to talk about with our customers is really providing the right toolkit for the audience. Databases are the linchpin of every single application out there. Access to that database is critical. If a database is down, your application is essentially not able to operate, and that can create some issues around downtime costs. That can create some issues around lost reputation. And having the right tools to allow you to quickly and proactively as well as reactively identify issues is critical.
Yeah, certainly. And I like the concepts you bring up there about some of the granularity that you need to really resolve those issues. A lot of these solutions, they're already embedded within the organization and in the database space, they might be thrusted to use those solutions because they're already there. And frankly, sometimes they hit that checkbox that says, oh yeah, we can help monitor the database environment, but they don't offer the granularity that you need to resolve certain issues that are business critical. And sometimes they don't offer the collection frequency that is needed to find those issues that can truly disrupt business.
For example, I have a customer who's a large distribution customer. And obviously they have thousands of products going through these assembly lines getting routed all different which ways and those labels are being printed. However, if there's just a small block in that database environment, that can cause a delay where they would actually have to pause the lines, send everything back 20 minutes, and then restart the systems. And that type of disruption has real world costs with those customers when that's where they identified we need something much more granular and something that can really dive down. Because again, some of those issues can happen underneath a second.
Yeah. Getting insight into what's happening in your database environment, who's using your database, what queries are they running. Is it a misconfiguration version of your database based on the expected load? Is it perhaps you've got teams running queries against that database out of band? Having an insight into who, what, why gives you that ability to resolve. And giving toolkits to the right people is critical. And that's something you don't get with those wider enterprise monitors.
The other thing that's really important is if you do go that approach, having the ability to integrate with those wider monitors gives you that full picture. It gives those wider site reliability engineers an overall view but allows them to engage the specialists as and when is needed. And that's something you should also be thinking about. Does your specific monitoring solution and observability solution integrate with that wider platform?
Yeah, certainly. We're not asking customers here to replace what they already have, because obviously the solutions Quest offer are very, very focused just into the database layer. So our ability to integrate with those systems, really allowing you to augment and enhance what you currently have, and then give your specialists that type of granularity that you need, but also be able to relay that communication, relay those dashboards, relay those alerts to the greater team, that can be invaluable for those professionals.
So the other thing to think about is having a solution that fits into your cost structure. Having a database observability and monitoring platform that provides the insight you need while fitting into that cost structure is really critical. Sometimes we've seen this with some customers. They'll think about just that lowest cost offering, which is typically that wider enterprise monitoring view. Just enough monitoring for your database. But sometimes that is really is essentially a false economy. You're saving money on the front end, but you're actually costing yourself, because you're not getting the insight and it's taking you longer to get to the resolution.
Certainly, certainly. So Mark, let's pivot the conversation to really that second breed of solutions that I mentioned earlier where we've gone from a very hierarchical view of the environment. However, it doesn't offer a lot of depth into the database specific area. But now we have another class of solutions that does provide a lot of granularity and a lot of depth. But again, they're a mile deep, but they're only an inch wide.
So they only specialize within the certain platform. And this can come from a platform vendor themselves. It could come from a third party like Quest. But again, some of those third parties only specialize in a certain database platform. This is one of the differentiators that we offer here at Quest is the ability to go both high and wide. With our solutions offering 13 different types of database platforms that we support really can help you overarch your entire monitoring strategy.
Yeah, that is super important when thinking about customers' environments right now. The days of a single relational database, legacy database is changing. It's no longer the case. We have customers who are running four to five database platforms. And what we're seeing is traditional Oracle and SQL server DBAs are now being asked to essentially be stewards of multiple data platforms. And whether that's relational, open source relational, looking at noSQL databases, looking at cloud databases, that is a challenge that has been burdened upon the DBA. We call that the accidental DBA. You're essentially now taking on multiple roles.
Having a single solution that can span those platforms is key. Not only that, but having the ability to have the same UI, the same workflows, the same operations, the same language for all of those platforms speeds that investigation time, and especially when we do have applications that cross over multiple database platforms. And we're seeing that with the rise of microservices and complex hybrid applications. It's no longer one query to an Oracle database. It is pulling some data from Oracle, from SQL server, from your Postgres environment, from Cassandra, from Mongo, and putting that together.
And so having the ability to investigate what is happening where and using the same workflow and methodology. It really just speeds the investigation. It helps you be much more efficient on a proactive fashion. But when things do go wrong and critical that you resolve those issues, having that unified view is really super important.
Yeah, certainly. I had a conversation with a large retailer where they were starting to be told from the business that, hey, these applications that we're building, we need you to support these applications on these open source noSQL type platforms. And we trust that your team can cover it, because you have database in your title, right?
And that created a giant challenge for that team because they need a solution, A, that could cover all those different platforms and not just sit on what they were used to with SQL server. But B, help that learning curve, because now they may be accidental Postgres or mySQL DBAs or MongoDB.
But then lastly, they still had a team that ran Oracle. And they had some issues where nobody was savvy enough within Oracle where they felt comfortable having those Oracle DBAs even take vacation. That type of staffing issue became important to them.
So that's why they really looked into a solution like Foglight, because number one, they knew that they had the coverage across all the platforms to help, A, curb the learning curve on the new platforms that they're bringing in. But B, offer at least some high level coverage while somebody may be out of office unexpectedly or expectedly just enough to maybe take some weight off their shoulders, again, through a common UI and a common workflow.
Yeah. And having the confidence in a solution that grows as your organization grows, as your application needs change. We continue to support you and grow as you grow. We are there as your application needs change. That is really key. And as you said, Gordon, allowing our DBAs to really expand their scope without creating too much pressure.
As you said, hey, you've got DBA in your title. You should be able to manage this. Oracle is just Oracle. It's the same as SQL server and Mongo. You can handle that. It's a lot tougher than you think. But this does, having a solution like Foglight with its unified view and workflows, gives you the ability to get to speed much more quickly and take your junior DBA, turn them into senior DBAs, take your Oracle expert, and allow them to become more of a Mongo expert.
Absolutely. And even as you're transitioning them from those different platforms with the workload analysis capabilities within Foglight, we can use solutions within Foglight like Performance Investigator, Query Insights, and Query Optimization where database administrators can now put their hat on backwards and become those database engineers to really optimize the flow of those SQL statements going through their environment and not always just be concerned with should I allocate more hardware.
Which actually somewhat segways into our third portion of solutions that we're seeing out on the market. And these are relatively newfound. Because again, cloud adaptation is really starting to kick off over the past five years. And now these cloud vendors are starting to produce their own solutions to give you insights into performance.
But one thing all my customers are telling me is most of these solutions are just telling me to add more and more resources, which keeps increasing my cloud costs. They're not giving me the insights I need to optimize the cloud infrastructure that I currently have. And that's a big concern for them.
Yeah. One of the important things, and this is historically true for all third party monitoring solutions, is there is a separation from the platform providers. And that gives a level of confidence that you're driving for the right answers. There is oftentimes an inherent bias in those solutions to using more of their solutions. And so as you said, cloud vendors may suggest, well, just increase the amount of CPU and memory you give to your database. But that has an impact on cost.
Being able to relate cloud cost and performance to your database performance is really critical. It lets you make decisions that are beneficial for your business. Do I need to increase this query performance based on performance or cost? So it lets you make the decisions that are vital for your business to be successful. And that's something I think Foglight is really unique in the industry for doing.
I also like the fact that you have a single solution that allows, as I said before, a single solution that allows you to have a unified view. Right now if you're running multiple cloud vendors with multiple database platforms, each of those have their own solutions and UIs to manage. That becomes cumbersome to really get a unified view. Having a single view like Foglight that looks across your Azure and your AWS and your Google landscape as well as all of those database platforms just makes it much more efficient.
This issue only compounds when you start to consider some of these data warehousing platforms, data intelligence platforms you may see out there where running queries within those can become quite costly.
Yeah, for sure. And having the ability to look at those queries across the entire landscape and track those down based on impact to that database instance or impact based on the time domain number of users, number of requests, and make the right decisions. Do you want to spend the time improving the query performance? Do you want to improve the query execution time? Is it worth it to do it? Having that insight to your fingertips really allows you to make the right decisions, as I said, for your business.
So certainly, Mark. And great insight that you've provided across these I would probably say different silos of solutions out there. And I'm sure everyone who's listening here today understands that one of the value adds that Quest bring is that, yeah, we can offer that granularity to allow you to go deep into workload, deep into database performance. We can offer that query optimization to help you run things smoother, but you don't have to sacrifice having a single siloed solution and managing multiple solutions.
You can consolidate your vendors, you can consolidate these solutions into a single framework across your entire database environment. And that framework can also integrate with some of those larger solutions out there that are monitoring the rest of the environment, some of those enterprise monitors through integrations and API calls and things of that nature.
Yeah. And you can feel confident as well that a solution like Foglight is built on the backs of database professionals. We have been working with various database technologies for over 20 years. We have deep expertise in those database landscapes, and we continue to evolve our solution using feedback from database professionals as well as our customers. So feel confident that when things are happening in your database, we understand that and we know why and we can help you resolve those issues as effectively as possible.
Well hey, wonderful time today, Mark. And thank you again. And if you're interested, and hopefully this conversation did pique your interest to learn more, I would certainly recommend just going to quest.com. If you go look at the lower right, there's always going to be that little chat bubble that pops up where you can connect with us and just tell us that you want to learn more. And we'll have one of our specialists reach out to you and have a little more of an extended conversation.
Feel free to ask for Mark. I'm here.
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I don't know what you got yourself into, Mark, but we'll hold you to it. How's that sound?
Sounds good.
All right. Well, thank you, guys. Have a great day.
Thanks, all.
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