SolarWinds announced the integration of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) with the SolarWinds Orion technology backbone.

The integration represents a significant milestone that enables stronger collaboration between database and systems administration teams to ensure the performance of business-critical applications by presenting wait time analysis and other key database performance metrics in the context of the application, all within the familiar SolarWinds Orion user interface.

According to a recent application performance management (APM) survey by Gleanster Research, 88 percent of respondents cited the database as the most common challenge or issue with application performance. Furthermore, 71 percent said their current APM tools only provide hints, but rarely identify the root cause of problems. This lack of visibility into the impact of database performance on applications is a key barrier to ensuring the availability of business-critical applications and also exacerbates a lack of collaboration between database and systems administrators.

With the integration of SolarWinds DPA with SolarWinds Orion—with which other key products in SolarWinds portfolio, including SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), also integrate—SolarWinds now provides database and systems administrators:

- A single view of performance, uptime, capacity and resource utilization across the stack—applications, databases, hypervisors and servers—to help pinpoint inefficient code, resource bottlenecks and application performance issues.

- Deeper application-specific context for database operations, asset management, instance discovery, capacity planning, index fragmentation and agent job status.

- Improved ability to figure out what to fix and more time actually fixing problems with wait-time analytics, performance-to-resource correlation and tuning advice.

“Business today lives and dies on the performance of applications, which themselves rely on an increasingly complex stack of underlying technologies, one of the most important yet least understood by systems administrators being the database,” said Gerardo Dada, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds. “At the same time, database administrators traditionally haven’t had visibility into the impact databases have on application performance. This has resulted in a significant disconnect that reduces the collective ability to drive peak application performance. Integrating SolarWinds DPA with the SolarWinds Orion technology backbone means the database is no longer the black box it once was to systems administrators, and database administrators have the visibility into the effect databases have on downstream applications to assist in the prevention of problems before applications are even impacted.”

SolarWinds DPA is a complete database performance monitoring, analysis and optimization tool for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Standard Edition, Oracle Enterprise Edition, IBM DB2 and SAP ASE operations — whether applications are hosted on-premises, in a virtualized environment or on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, where it supports both RDS and EC2 instances. It features multi-dimensional performance analysis, storage performance analysis, correlation and dynamic metric baselining with alerting and reporting to help pinpoint the root cause of performance issues quickly.

While SolarWinds DPA now integrates with the SolarWinds Orion technology backbone, existing SolarWinds DPA customers not currently leveraging SolarWinds Orion will not need to install SolarWinds Orion to continue using it. However, database teams can benefit from the integration and additional capabilities made possible with SolarWinds SAM.