Alerts: they make themselves available as on premise software, SaaS, and Cloud. Doesn't matter if one is full featured or poor, if one uses machine learning or come with no intelligence, all of them come with a common issue:
THEY WILL MAKE YOU SUFFER AND GET ANNOYED BY TONS OF EMAILS, SMS, WHATSAPP MESSAGES
Now you have needy servers, and emails/messages to be read (maybe) and deleted. That's the point: keep your attention on really noble tasks. I can guarantee that reading email alerts is not one . And that's is my point when talking about monitoring tools. For more the 30 years working with databases of diverse vendors (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other weird animals) I have searched for monitoring tools to help keep me focused on the database not in the alerts. I have found NONE.
Nagios and Zabbix are too generic, like aspirin for kidneys. Aim Better is just a pretty interface. SQL Monitor is doing a good job. Data Dog barks a lot. Solarwinds and Idera are great but expensive.
Because of this I have decided to build from scratch a 100% SaaS monitoring and advisory tool that delivers charming charts for quick analysis, machine learning based, tickets management and knowledge base, scheduling, auditing and the most important it comes with free NOC. It means that somebody will call me (yes, call by phone and other means) when something goes wrong. No longer emails and SMS will distract me. No more night shifts.
That's my idea of Virtual DBA.
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