SolarWinds announced enhancements to its IT performance management platform. The upgrades are designed to improve application performance by optimizing SQL Server, Oracle and other database operations. The apps can be hosted on premises or in a virtualized environment in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
The company’s Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) continuously monitors SQL Server, Oracle, SAP ASE (formerly Sybase) and DB2 databases in physical, cloud-based and VMware environments. It identifies database performance issues that impact end-user response times, isolates root causes, shows historical performance trends and dynamic baselines, and correlates metrics with response times and performance.
DPA pricing starts at $1,995 for SQL Server and Oracle Standard Edition, and $3,495 for Oracle Enterprise Edition, DB2 and SAP ASE.
"Improvements in database performance result in application improvements, which in turn result in more productivity by all the people who use that application. In fact, for today’s consumers, an application that does not respond in just three seconds, is simply not working," Gerardo Dada, SolarWinds’ vice president of product marketing and strategy, told eWEEK. "Most businesses rely on applications to run. Salespeople need a CRM system. Information workers need access to email and data, doctors need access to medical records, and retailers need a point of purchase system and credit card processing, and so on."
Both the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and the downloadable version, available on the SolarWinds Website, offer two-week trials, and all database platforms are licensed by the instance. The price includes the first year of maintenance.
In its latest version, DPA provides performance analysis for databases on the Amazon Cloud deployed on EC2 servers and in RDS database instances. DPA is available as an AMI in the AWS Marketplace to enable faster deployment.
"Smaller businesses with limited IT resources need to make the best use of those resources. Often, the default path to improve application performance is to spend money on hardware, but that solution can be expensive, of course, and might not even solve the problem," Dada explained. "Small and large businesses need the right tools to find exactly what is slowing down an application in order to be effective and efficient in removing those bottlenecks."
Other features include a single view to monitor hundreds of instances of major database platforms regardless of deployment methodology, including hybrid (monitoring of on-premises database instances from the cloud, or cloud database instances from on-premises), and the ability for users to annotate changes to configuration and deployment within the historical timeline and directly associate them with changes to monitored metrics and database response time.
DPA also features multi-dimensional performance analysis, which provides IT departments with additional visibility into how the application performs database operations and the location of bottlenecks.
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