As developers, we all strive to keep our systems in shape. We maintain them, we review metrics and logs, and we react to alerts. We do whatever it takes to make sure that our systems do not break, especially databases that are crucial to our applications. Wouldn’t it be great if there was no need to do the maintenance at all? Would you like to just have tools that could take care of your databases and let you forget that they exist altogether? Read on how to do that.

Hardships of Database Maintenance

As developers in today's world, we need to maintain our databases. We need to fix performance issues, maintain indexes, and perform routine maintenance tasks. This takes time and slows us down. This also impacts everything we do - the way we review our code, we run our CI/CD pipelines, or we deploy the software

One thing that can make our lives much easier when it comes to the services we are building is continuous database reliability. We would like to know whenever things break in our databases without going and checking explicitly. What’s more, we’d like all the issues to be fixed automatically. We would like to sleep well and not worry about on-call duties, maintenance tasks, or scaling. Our tools must support us in maintaining the databases.

Most industry solutions don’t give us that. They swamp us with raw infrastructure metrics, manually curated alerts, or detailed dashboards that blink green and red but don’t give any answers. We need something better. We need tools that can run anomaly detection, tune the alarms automatically, identify weekly patterns, understand database-focused metrics, and fix issues automatically. We should be alerted only when the issues can’t be solved automatically. We shouldn’t think about databases at all and most of the problems should be avoided or solved by the tools without intervention from our end.

Recommended reading: All Your Monitoring Solutions Are Wrong, Here's Why

Metis gives us exactly that and we can completely forget about the databases. Metis understands database-focused signals, detects anomalies, identifies patterns, reviews configurations and extensions, and alerts us only when issues need to be solved outside of database and deployment levels. Read on to see what Metis brings.

Metis Understands Databases

Metis truly understands how your database works. It can analyze database-oriented metrics around transactions, caches, index usage, extensions, buffers, and all other things that show the performance of the database.

Metis dives deep into database-related events like rollbacks, disk spills, or unused indexes. This way you’re not overloaded with infrastructure metrics that show that your CPU usage spiked but don’t explain why it happened.

Metis analyzes queries and looks for anomalies. It can give you insights into how things behave over time, why they are slow, and how to improve performance. All of that is in real-time for the queries that come to your database.

Metis gives you actionable insights. You know which indexes to configure or how to change the queries to make them faster.

Apart from metrics and queries, Metis understands everything database-related! It can reason about your indexes, settings, configurations, extensions, and schema.

Metis walks you through the process of tuning your database. Most importantly, it can do it automatically and all you need to do is just approve the changes.

Metis alerts you when things need your attention. Most of the issues can be fixed automatically. For issues that can’t be solved this way, Metis integrates with your platforms and tells you what is needed and how to do it. You don’t need to tune the alerts as Metis detects anomalies and knows when things break.

Metis lets you sleep well. You don’t need to worry about your databases as Metis will let you know when things require your attention.

Metis analyzes the schema of your database. This way, Metis helps you write your applications better.

Metis walks you end-to-end through the software development life cycle. It covers everything from when you implement your changes until they are up and running in production.

Forget your databases exist!

Developers face many challenges. There are no tools in the market that understand databases and provide actionable insights. Metis helps you throughout your software development life cycle, reviews your changes, suggests improvements, and automatically fixes issues. You don’t need to think about your databases anymore. Use Metis and sleep well knowing that all is taken care of.

Recommended reading: Database Chaos: Is Your Bottom Line Hanging By a Thread?