I am not an official DBA but a database developer that wears the DBA hat a lot in what I do. In my production support role, I needed help in being more proactive in monitoring and addressing issues in our database applications. I also wanted some of the expertise that can sometimes come “built-in” to these monitoring tools. So I pushed to buy a tool.

Regardless of if the tool is one that I purchase or build myself, don’t I still have some work to do and decisions to make in how to use the tool or what the data actually means? It would be great to have guidance and recommended best practices, without necessarily having to deal with how I am getting the data.

Perhaps even something as simple as the pro / con of deploying the tool on the same server that it is monitoring.