Key Database Performance Metrics You Must Track Regularly

Database performance metrics help you with database performance monitoring and optimize it for your business. Here are the key database performance metrics for MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle that you can track regularly.

Key Database Performance Metrics You Must Track Regularly

Database performance is measured with the help of database performance metrics. Here are the key database performance metrics that matter, which you can you use to monitor MySQL query statistics & performance metrics, and even for monitoring Mariadb, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle.

1. Database Throughput

Database throughput is one of the most important database performance metrics. It is the volume of work done by your database server over a unit of time such as per second, or per hour. It is usually measured as number of queries executed per second.

Database throughput allows you to monitor how quickly your server is able to process incoming queries. If your database throughput is less than the number of incoming queries, then it can overload your server and result in longer waiting time for each query, thereby slowing down your website/application. In such cases, you may want to upgrade your server infrastructure or optimize queries.

You can monitor the live database throughput as a single number on a dashboard that you can share with your team.

You can also monitor overall database throughput over time, as total number of queries executed per second, in a column chart or line chart.

Further you can also monitor query throughput for different type of queries such as select, insert, delete, and update, as these are most commonly used.

Bonus Read : How to Choose a Dashboard Software for Your Business

2. Database Response or Latency

Database Response is one of the most common database performance metrics. It is the average response time per query, for your database server. It shows how long your server has to work before it gets a query result.

You can monitor the live database response as a single number on a dashboard that you can share with your team.

You can also measure the overall average response time for all queries on your database server using a column graph or line chart.

Further, you will need to break down this metric for each type of query such as select, insert, delete, and update.

If your average response time is more than expected, then you may want to optimize your queries or increase concurrency. Such analysis will help you quickly spot bottlenecks and fix them as soon as possible.

Bonus Read : Key Principles of Effective Dashboards

3. Database Connections

Most of the times, a database server goes down because of long running queries or too many open connections. The above two database performance metrics will help you identify long-running queries and respond quickly.

You need to separately monitor number of open database connections to see if they are choking your server.

If you have way too many open database connections, in spite of having only a few users, then it is possible that your website/application is not closing db connections after retrieving query results. In that case, you may want to review website/application code to ensure that it is closing all unnecessary db connections.

Bonus Read : BI Best Practices for Dashboard Design

4. Number of errors

Whenever an SQL query doesn’t run successfully, your database must be returning an error response code. Track the number of queries for each error code, so that you can easily find out which errors occur most frequently and how you can fix them

Here’s an example of a simple graph that shows the count of errors for common errors. Since there are many error codes for each database type, you can monitor the top 5-10 most frequent ones.

Bonus Read : What Should Ecommerce KPI Dashboard Include

5. Most Frequent Queries

It is also important to track the top 5-10 most frequent queries received by your database server, along with their frequency and average latency. Optimizing these queries will result in a significant performance boost in your database.

You can create a simple table report to monitor those queries and share them with your team

There are plenty of database performance metrics but these are the ones that matter the most. So plot them on a Database Performance dashboard using a dashboard software like Ubiq, as shown below and share them with your team.