Database Monitoring in Healthcare

Blythe.Morrow 11 months ago 6 minute read time

Database teams across healthcare industries must maintain consistent access to their applications and prevent interruptions that could affect the front line.

There are unique challenges database professionals in healthcare industries encounter. Server reliability, query performance, and database scalability issues can lead to disruptions that impact lives. From hospitals providing vital care to researchers pioneering ambulatory medicine, it’s important for those who manage healthcare database systems to strive for optimized workloads and find the root cause of critical issues.

Healthcare organizations are looking for better capabilities when monitoring critical database workloads while also managing the performance implications of constant changes to applications and infrastructure. It’s a tall order for database teams in this sector. To achieve ecosystem growth, organizations must make database performance management a critical component to the success of their business. Doctors, providers, and all front-line staff must have rapid access to their applications and data.

Database Monitoring in HealthCare

Database monitoring is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Healthcare operations, from large-scale hospital networks to small clinics, vary their data ecosystems based on many factors: the needs and technical maturity of the organization, the infrastructure design, and the complexity of its database operations.

SolarWinds helps serve this complexity with a portfolio of database monitoring and observability solutions. We enable Healthcare organizations to understand their data’s performance and remediate critical issues facing the business.

There are three great healthcare database monitoring solutions available from SolarWinds: Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), SQL Sentry, and Server & Application Monitor (SAM). These are excellent tools for monitoring the performance of your databases in healthcare, and they enable you to share information quickly and accurately across healthcare systems and platforms.

Database Performance Analyzer – Muti-Database Monitoring

Dig deep into spikes in healthcare database behavior with Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). DPA supports many types of database monitoring, including MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server.

DPA is designed to deep dive into core metrics, such as CPU, memory, and storage, to analyze healthcare database performance. It can quickly discover root sources and help you ensure the health and performance of databases throughout your healthcare systems.

DPA is great for developers and healthcare teams responsible for the performance of their code due to the following factors:

DPA monitors historical and current data, so you can continuously check for issues to stay on top of database management.
DPA is designed so you can hold these metrics against each other, creating baselines and thresholds to help you categorize critical healthcare events.
You can use these thresholds to trigger alarms, further increasing your database monitoring speedand management.
DPA’s automation tools can also provide insights and offer opportunities, recommendations, and best practices for your database in healthcare.
Accelerate troubleshooting by searching specific SQL queries using name, then diagnose database performance issues associated within time frames, across users, and inside applications.

SolarWinds DPA is designed to work with many platforms including MySQL, Amazon AWS and RDS, Azure SQL Server, Database DevOps Tool, and more. As a cross-platform solution, DPA offers virtualized, cloud, and on-premises healthcare database monitoring. You can download a free 14-day trial of DPA.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry- For Microsoft SQL Server

With comprehensive support for SQL Server running in physical, virtual, and cloud environments, SQL Sentry offers many unique capabilities designed to empower you to efficiently monitor, diagnose, and optimize your Microsoft Data Estate.

SolarWinds^® SQL Sentry^® is a powerful, scalable database performance monitoring solution designed to help you solve Microsoft database performance problems— and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

Built with an agentless architecture, SQL Sentry can scale to hundreds of production database servers with no loss in monitoring data and low-performance overhead, so it’s great for large SQL Server environments. Deploying multiple SQL Sentry monitoring services per site allows for load balancing of data collections and high availability.

SQL Sentry delivers actionable, detailed performance metrics with “Jump To” navigation, so you can quickly switch views to see key metrics across your database systems that help you identify and address problems. You can see real-time data or data for a specific time period using the default dashboard view or by creating custom charts and dashboards in SQL Sentry Portal to display the metrics most important to you.

Laser focus on Microsoft databases – SQL Sentry was built from the ground up by Microsoft data experts, so you’ll experience faster time to value when troubleshooting per performance problems with SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and other Microsoft databases.

SQL Sentry Top Features for Healthcare

Supporting data pros in the healthcare industry, working on the Microsoft Data platform

At-a-glance view of database environment health with the ability to create custom performance metrics baselines to see if any deviations are occurring and show the impact of code, hardware, workload, and configuration changes. Know what is normal vs. changed performance.
Proactive alerting and response system.
Find and fix high-impact queries with our Top Queries dashboard. Compare with historical query data, and even dive into query execution plans.
Manage scheduled events and identify resource contention in an Outlook-style calendar
Storage forecasting powered by predictive analytics.
Identify contributing problems in the OS and virtual environment.
Can monitor MS SQL, Windows, SQL Server analysis services, VMware /Hyper-V. Azure SQL DB, SQL Server on EC2 or RDS. and show the impact of code, hardware, workload,

The free trial of SQL Sentry lasts for two weeks.

Hybrid Cloud Observability – Server Monitoring

SAM is designed to provide end-to-end monitoring for your database in healthcare. As part of the Hybrid Cloud Observability suite of applications, SAM Identifies performance that could negatively affect patient care. Because it’s a server component connected to network and system monitoring, you can monitor the status of individual workstations, and make an inventory of hardware and software, while also monitoring the efficiency of databases.

Besides helping with healthcare data exchanges, transactions, and other operations, SAM is built to leverage automation tools that help you monitor your healthcare database environment. Schedule performance report deliveries, plus automatically discover new servers and applications brought into your databases across healthcare systems.

SAM is designed to work on Microsoft applications, systems, hypervisors, and IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS products. This includes Azure and AWS, Active Directory, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Docker, Mesos, and more. SAM also enables you to monitor healthcare metrics through on-premises, cloud-hosted, or hybrid environments from the same database monitoring tool.

Connect your database monitoring to Infrastructure and Network

Get cross-stack data correlation on common timelines with drag-and-drop capabilities, which can help you easily spot database performance issues. SAM is designed to take these cross-correlations and establish thresholds, enabling you to get alerts for network latency, packet loss, and other metrics. Thresholds can also be used to set warnings, trigger alarms, and check maps for real-time statistics.

With over a thousand application monitoring templates, SolarWinds SAM enables you to customize server monitoring while automatically discovering and mapping complex environments. Access all this and more on a single interface that easily allows for modifications as your healthcare database management systems evolve. You can access a 30-day free trial of SAM today.

SAM is a great tool that keeps a watchful eye on your server environments. It lets you know what needs your attention and connects reporting to your network and infrastructure. But if you want to get right to the root of a database problem down to the query level, we recommend DPA and SQL Sentry to enhance the experience.