Database Performance Analyzer 10 is available now!!!!

I am excited to say that Database Performance Analyzer 10.0, with MySQL support, is now available.  For the Orion users out there we have also extended the DPA data for MySQL into the integration. DPA 10.0 is now available in the customer portal to download for customers on active maintenance.  If you are new to DPA and want to try it, you can download an evaluation from the SolarWinds website.

New Features in 10.0

• Support monitoring MySQL in DPA
  • Register and monitor your on-premise, cloud, and RDS MySQL instances.
  • Multi-Dimensional Monitoring of MySQL
  • Advisors for MySQL
  • Metrics for MySQL
  • Integration between DPA and Orion for MySQL instances
• Baselines for Resource page
• Updated Resource collection for SQL Server, No More WMI!!!

Note: DPA 9.5 was renamed to 10.0 before release.  If you are running the release candidate DPA 9.5, no need to rush to upgrade to 10.0.

Register MySQL Instances

Register MySQL on-premise and in the cloud (RDS &  EC2). Whether your MySQL instance is on RDS, EC2, or on-premise, the data shown in DPA is the same!  Register a MySQL instance the same as you would for any other supported database in DPA. Have several instances to register no problem, use the Mass Registration wizard that can be found in Options.

Multi-dimensional Monitoring of MySQL

MySQL DBA's have never really had a tool that could show them their problem SQL Statements.  A lot of tuning work comes from the slow query log and monitoring metrics. While this can be important, this tuning path often misses the SQL that most effects the user.  You certainly can't find a query in the slow query log if it runs in .01 seconds.  However if that query is now running in .1 seconds and it runs thousands of times in an hour, it is most definitely the biggest pain point for your users.

In the screen capture below, you can see I have drilled into the familiar 'Time' dimension.  From here, you can see that  I can easily click to the Database tab to select and isolate SQLs that are coming from 1 specific database.  This isolation can be done the for any of the dimensions.

The new dimensions for MySQL are 'Wait Instruments' and 'Operations'.

• Use the Wait Instruments dimension to drill into the granual detail of what a specific wait is doing, as an example I can drill into the 'updating' wait and then choose to find out just the query's that are in the 'io/file/innodb/innodb_log_file' wait instrument vs the 'lock/table/sql/handle' instrument.
  • Wait Instruments are exposed by MySQL if the MySQL Performance Schema is enabled. Wait Instruments are based on instrumented portions of the DB engine that you can enable at startup or during run-time via the Performance Schema configuration

• Using the example mentioned above, once I select the 'io/file/innodb/innodb_log_file' wait instrument, I can go to the Operations tab I can see the SQL that are either performing sync or write operations.
  • Operations are exposed by MySQL if the MySQL Performance Schema is enabled. Operations are based on instrumented portions of the DB engine that are enabled by enabling Wait Instruments.

Advisors

You may say 'Ok Kathy, that is a lot of information and all of this data is great, but what do I do with it?'.  That is where the Advisors, Query Advice, and wait advice in general comes in.  Let's say we saw a lot of blocking with a SQL. I click on the Query Advice and select the SQL I am concerned with.

Below is an example of the Query Advisor in DPA.  You can see the highest hours that had blocking, an explanation of what Blocking is, and other areas to look in DPA to troubleshoot this problem further.

Resource Metrics

DPA has added more out of the box metrics for MySQL than we have for any other database we support.  The good news is you get all these metrics PLUS, you still can create a custom resource metric just like you can for the other monitored instances

Note:This is one area of DPA that provides more detail for InnoDB than other engines.

Integration with Orion

We are building on what we did in the previous 9.2 release by giving SAM and Orion users the ability to see MySQL in Orion.

• Dashboard views for NOC teams.
• Publish response time analysis data to application monitors used by development and support teams.
• See what is happening on your hosts and be able to correlate host activity to database activity

To see the full integration with Orion, go here Announcing DPA 9.2 GA : Is it the Application or the Database?

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Baselines for Metrics Page

Let's go back to that Resource (metrics) page for a moment.  you may notice something new.  Yep, that is the same 'Show Baselines' button that is on the Resources tab. When there is  a metric that is in alarm on the home page, here the Memory 'Warning alarm is circled', you want to click on that alarm to find out more details.

You can see that clicking on that warning icon brings you to the memory tab on the metrics page.  However once we got to the Resource Metric page, you noticed that there is a critical issue with Sorts and the Memory issue has resolved itself.  Here you can see a short snippet of what this Metric means as well as the Baseline for the metric. You can easily see that the Row Sort Rate is higher than the baseline for this hour.  This would call for more investigate in DPA.

So the obvious next question is 'How I can download the DPA 10'?

For current customers, just log into the Customer Portal to download DPA 10.0.

If you want to try out DPA for the first time, download it from the SolarWinds website. 

What's next for DPA?  You can review our What We Are Working on post  What We Are Working On for DPA (Updated Sep 16, 2015)