The out-of-the box result is quite remarkable and, from my experience, absolutely “management-compatible” with a nice logo on a separate front page.
and concise presented information on the following page(s).
However, you certainly would want to customise the reports, add you own logo and “personalise” them. Respectively bring them in line with your corporate standards, or maybe create your own reporting standards.
Create new reports and/or bring your currently existing ones to dbWatch to harmonise your reporting and give it the same “look and feel” across all databases. Management will certainly appreciate this effort.
Another neat feature of dbWatch is the ability to schedule report and send them automatically to a list of recipients.
In order to send out mails from dbWatch, you need to configure a separate mail extension. dbWatch supports an open plugin architecture. As you can see, the mail extension is already available and now only needs to be configured.
Configure the mail extension is no rocket science, even though it may appear difficult at first sight.
Once you have configured dbWatch and have used it for some days, you surely have already noticed the dbWatch Monitor icon in the system tray. This icon gives you an immediate overview of the state of your servers. When everything is running smoothly, this symbol is green. As soon as something goes wrong, this symbol changes its colour as shown in the above screenshot.
When this is the case, you can open the dbWatch Monitor and inspect what going on. The screenshot above indicates a problem with the database backups as the alert went yellow. All other tasks are green, so those are working fine. The database log backup job has been disabled (just for demonstration purposes, of course).
At the end of this review, let me draw your attention on a feature that I have touched already here and there throughout this review, but this feature clearly deserves a little bit more attention: The SQL Worksheet.
The SQL Worksheet is an integrated SQL query editor. But it is more than this! It is a centre for the DBA from which he can run queries against all his servers no matter which platform.
Certainly a big help is the object browser that works for all database platforms and lets you inspect databases and their objects down to the single object level.
Once you have identified an object of interest, like the table in the screenshot above, you can open the table with a right-click and view either the data or the definition.
However, even more interesting than showing a screenshot that proves that dbWatch can query and display data from a table, I’ve chosen to have a look at the definition of a user-defined function in the AdventureWorks database.
You can use this Worksheet to dig into any issues without having the need to leave dbWatch and use another tool. Although quite simple to use, the SQL Worksheet gives a production DBA everything he needs for his work.
Conclusion
dbWatch is a highly interesting monitoring tool for all those of us who work in a heterogeneous database environment. It offers most of the common monitoring features for the supported platforms right out of the box using platform-targeted code. The shipped code can be extended and customised in almost any way you like. You can seamlessly integrate all the monitoring code you are currently using by adding new tasks and alerts. With dbWatch it is possible to unify and standardise monitoring across different platforms. The very powerful reporting engine makes it really easy to create meaningful reports that are “management-compatible”. The open plugin architecture offers the chance to integrate dbWatch seamlessly into an existing infrastructure. If you have a need for such a monitoring tool, make sure you try dbWatch. It could very well be that it is the tool you are looking for.
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