As part of its ongoing mission to enable any organization to get the most value out of any database, on any platform, anywhere, Redgate’s popular database monitoring tool, SQL Monitor, now offers support for SQL Server on Linux.
SQL Server on Linux was released with SQL Server 2017 and has proved to be increasingly popular with users because organizations which run their workloads on the open source platform can take a consistent approach for both their applications and their databases. This is supported by data from the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey which shows that in 2017, less than a quarter of developers used Linux as their primary operating system, and this rose to over a third in the 2022 survey1. Perhaps more tellingly, a 2021 Unisphere survey of PASS members found that 31 percent of data managers had deployed databases on the open source platform.
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Redgate has long anticipated this shift and two of the development teams behind SQL Monitor were tasked with adding Linux functionality to the tool. Given the differences between the Windows and Linux operating systems, this was a major task.
SQL Monitor collects Windows machine metrics using WMI queries, for example, and is agentless, which reduces the load on the servers being monitored. This has the added advantage that it enables a web-based dashboard to be used, enabling access from anywhere and across a wide range of devices.
The metrics themselves, however, need to be exhaustive in order to provide the broadest, and deepest, picture of the host machine’s health, its performance, and its configuration. To achieve this, SQL Monitor now collects Linux metrics across a variety of measures like CPU, memory, network, and disk activity, along with the most resource-intensive processes, and the operating system properties in order to provide the most useful information and alerts.
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Those metrics as well as the processes, properties, and alerts are displayed alongside those of SQL Server on Windows on-premises, or in Azure, AWS, or GCP. This lets users get the most out of SQL Monitor’s intuitive interface, which enables entire estates to be managed from a single pane of glass, whether servers are hosted locally or in the cloud.
As Max Drobot, the Product Manager of SQL Monitor at Redgate comments: “The SQL Server on Linux support which has now been launched gives organizations the opportunity to experience first-hand how they can now monitor their databases, whether on Windows or Linux, using one tool with a single view of their database estate. The teams behind the development have reached another major milestone for SQL Monitor.”
The work has also opened the door to expanding the use of SQL Monitor beyond platforms to open source database engines that are commonly hosted on Linux machines. For a year now, another development team at Redgate has been working on adding support for PostgreSQL to SQL Monitor. The Linux project has laid the foundations for that support to be even more comprehensive than originally planned.
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