With IT teams around the world adjusting to remote working while still struggling to maintain productivity and workflows, ensuring DevOps and Agile practices are in place has never been more important. And while typical DevOps professionals probably have significantly better remote desktop setups than most of their business peers, it’s how IT leaders manage these teams that will make all the difference. One way to approach this is by implementing database monitoring.
Many DBAs and developers have been working remotely for months now, but as IT budgets grow tighter, they’ll need to do more with less. Ensuring DBAs have the ability to monitor the database from anywhere will be a core part of a continued successful remote working strategy. There are many reasons for database professionals to embrace remote monitoring, whether it’s migrating to the cloud, adapting to new challenges, keeping an eye on multiple instances in many environments or gaining fine-grained access to monitoring data.
Success Remote IT Team Management
Here’s a look at some best practices for remote IT teams.
Easing cloud adoption woes: Cloud adoption is up significantly this year as development teams turn to it, particularly for greenfield projects. But with all of that data migration, database professionals are struggling with being able to monitor cloud-based servers alongside on-premises servers, and having a distributed team doesn’t make it easier. Adopting remote monitoring tools can simplify monitoring of the cloud—once you’re monitoring a remote database server it doesn’t matter where the server is. It’s impossible to say what might happen next month or even next year, but as companies grapple with these cloud challenges, advanced remote monitoring tools can help monitor disparate, hybrid environments from one screen.
The need for non-production environments: Non-production environments such as UAT and staging are often used to spot problems before deploying software to customers, but it becomes a little more challenging when you can’t simply walk down to the server room, where they’re often housed, and clear up any issues that arise. With remote working and moves to the cloud, consistent database monitoring can help make it much easier to manage non-production servers so that developers can review the systems, understand any potential problems and fix the issues. And although monitoring non-production environments is a good start, errors can still make it into production environments. Setting up database monitoring by configuring the right set of alerts for any environment ensures that teams are always aware of the most critical errors as they’re occurring, rather than finding out after systems become unresponsive.
Managing access control: When people usually think of “access control,” most immediately jump to the idea of security. But access control is about much more than just keeping people out—it can also mean letting the right people in. Providing developers with read-only access to monitoring tools lessens the load on production DBAs. While the DBA team is handling infrastructure-level tasks, developers can focus on improving the performance and stability of their applications if they have access to monitoring data. Managing this correctly with your developers and DBA teams ensures they have better insights into overall application performance and how their changes affect it.
Identifying Agents of Change: There’s real value in identifying one or more persons to be an Agent of Change in your organization, especially when working to improve database engineering and delivery. An Agent of Change is adept in both their role as a developer and as a communicator. It’s usually someone from the data processing team who can move into one of the front-end teams and seamlessly offer help both in designing short-term changes and in helping evolve the architecture of the system. Agents of Change are invaluable when you have established silos between development and operations, particularly when there are limited healthy lines of communication between the groups. They work to bridge that gap and can help make a big difference, even for teams working remotely.
Bringing it All Together
Remote awareness is critical to keeping development and production environments healthy, but visibility into all of your databases and systems doesn’t need to disappear when nobody is in the office. And considering there’s no telling when people will be able to get back to a normal office routine, remote monitoring becomes much more important. Regardless of location, by actively monitoring databases remotely, companies can spend more time and attention on innovation and freeing up their team for other activities. Look for web-based tools that can monitor hybrid environments seamlessly and allow your software and database teams to do this so that problems can be spotted and resolved quickly. Managing non-production environments and access control are good ideas, as are finding and appointing a team leader who can serve as the liaison between your remote teams. After all, with clearer paths of communication present, your teams can be more productive, too.
