Databases like Riak need to be up and running at all times. To be more precise, businesses depend on perfect uptimes – 99 percent and above – to ensure uninterrupted services
The databases should also be running at optimal performance to smoother business processing. This post will look into the best tools for Riak database monitoring. These
Here is our list of the best tools for Riak database monitoring:
- Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) Tracks Riak issues and helps troubleshoot them for quicker resolution; it has root cause analysis capabilities for a wide array of digital assets, which helps paint a complete picture of the database in its habitat. Start a 30-day free trial.
- Datadog Monitors and secures the entire stack, not just Riak databases; it quickly diagnoses root causes and spots abnormal behaviors reported via composite alerts and displayed in interactive dashboards.
- Dynatrace An all-in-one platform for observability, automation, AI, and security; it performs quick assessments at the TCP level allowing it to run any network that uses the protocol.
- Zabbix A highly scalable solution ideal for more extensive, distributed networks; it has encryption to secure communications between all its components and can be further enhanced thanks to integration with many third-party technology vendors.
- AppPerfect An easy-to-use, self-sufficient, and highly effective tool for ensuring the health of Riak databases; it uses the latest technology to deliver agentless tracking that is not resource-intensive.
- Circonus An enterprise-level full-stack monitoring tool with a Riak plugin that tracks performance and makes forecasts; it is ideal for complete business intelligence requirements and easy issue resolutions.
- Riemann Αn open-source tool for monitoring distributed systems for applications and databases; it is easily configurable and can integrate with visualization and interface apps for enhanced functionality.
What is Riak?
Riak is an open-source NoSQL database designed to store large amounts of data while simultaneously having the capability for high-performance and massively parallel processing (MPP) of data. It is very scalable and the ideal database for business environments where a large amount of data is processed. Riak’s flexible data model makes it easy to access the data that it stores.
Riak comes in two versions – Riak KV and Riak TS. While they are both built on the same Riak Core but serve slightly different purposes:
- Riak KV is easy to use, is very scalable, and offers high availability. It automatically distributes data across clusters for faster performance and better fault tolerance. It is built on the key-value architecture, which allows it to perform better than relational databases in many scenarios.
- Riak TS – is perfect for optimizing the Internet of Things (IoT) and Time Series Data. It has quicker read-write response times, making extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) time and location data accessible. It is ideal for working with Big Data and hybrid-cloud applications.
What to look for when searching for the best tools for Riak database monitoring
Let’s have a look at some features that make for the best Riak database monitoring tool:
- User-friendliness Any tool should be user-friendly. Any user, and not just members of the IT team, should be able to be proficient with it in a short time.
- In-depth graphics and data visualization Τhe whole purpose of using a tool is to get tangible information from it. A Riak database monitoring tool should monitor its data and present it in graphical formats that facilitate querying and analysis.
- Sharing of information Αll information garnered from the tool should be shareable for all stakeholders. Extracted reports and graphs should be easily embeddable in third-party applications too.
- Delivery of required information Τhere is no point in using a monitoring tool that keeps track of data irrelevant to gauging a database’s health and security. There is also no point in going through reports if they can’t help in pinpointing issues or even monitoring its day-to-day performance.
- Integrability Αny tool should seamlessly integrate into the network it is being installed in.
- Scalability Μonitoring tools should keep up with the growth of a business and the increase of data storage and processing.
- Price Τhe return on investment should always be worth the price of a tool. Also, there is no need to pay for a premium tool when an open-source solution performs better than it.
All the tools we have chosen to be one of the seven best tools for Riak database monitoring have been compared based on these features.
The Best Tools for Riak Database Monitoring
Let’s go ahead and have a look at what these seven of the best database monitoring tools for Riak look like:
1. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL)
Site24x7 is another major player in the market that makes tools for monitoring availability and user experience (UX) performance for DevOps and IT Operation teams.
Key Features:
- Users can be up and running in a matter of minutes – once the Site24x7 plugin is installed and configured, it immediately starts tracking critical metrics that the agent will then send to the server.
- The tool tracks a wide array of metrics and makes it easy to spot errors and unexpected anomalies – alerts can be configured to notify users, who can then start troubleshooting with the help of metric graphs.
- It keeps track of the number of protocol buffer connections to show the number of protocol buffer connections and how many are active.
- It tracks the total memory allocation for storage and how much of it is in use at any given time; the same goes for memory allocated for binaries – since Riak is a key/value store and its values are stored as binary.
- Site24x7 has an Application Performance Monitor (APM), a Website Monitoring Tool, and a Network Monitoring Tool that can also be used alongside the database monitor for a more in-depth administrative experience across the whole stack.
- It has a wide range of administrative tools, making it a viable solution for enterprises using a mix of operating systems and network infrastructures.
Administrators can use this tool to track Riak outages and then troubleshoot the issues with root cause analysis capabilities, with the added help of the custom plugins they can easily create.
Apart from Riak, it can monitor various operating systems, platforms, and databases like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware, and Docker.
Try Site24x7 FREE for 30 days.
2. Datadog
Datadog makes some of the best application, server, and network monitoring products on the market today. One good reason to opt for this company’s solutions is that it allows for the monitoring and securing of the entire stack – including Riak databases.
Key Features:
- Datadog offers end-to-end application tracing, latency breakdowns, and stack traces to help identify slow-running queries, causes of bottlenecks, and error rates.
- It also collects query throughput, execution performance, connections, and buffer pool usage metrics.
- With the data in hand, analysis can be performed using its intuitive logging platform coupled with auto-pattern recognitions, allowing for monitoring the database’s key data metrics alongside that of the rest of the stack.
- Apart from their Riak databases, administrators can also monitor their cloud services, containers, and serverless functions – all in one place and along with over 500 other vendor-backed seamless integrations.
- It allows users to create highly-customizable dashboards – using drag-and-drop development instead of coding – which help visualize granular data and metrics in real-time.
- Administrators can quickly diagnose root causes and spot anomalous behaviors across the whole stack – and not just the Riak database – by correlating query metrics with other metrics for databases and infrastructures; they can then seamlessly navigate these metrics, application traces, and logs for a clearer picture of what is going on at anywhere and at any point of time.
- Users across the board can gain access to the information without worrying about needing access to the Riak database – this helps secure the data stored on it.
- Based on Boolean logic, composite alerts can be set for anomalies and outliers regardless of the number of databases or usage scale – forecasts can also be made to prevent outages and errors proactively.
Datadog brings together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs to ensure a clear insight across the entire application, infrastructure, and third-party services landscape.
This monitoring as a service (MaaS) offers a performance monitoring tool that, once activated, can be run from anywhere to monitor Riak servers.
Try Datadog for FREE.
3. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is an all-in-one platform for observability, automation, AI, and cloud-native application security. It uses Software Intelligence to tackle the management of cloud environments.
Key Features:
- Dynatrace allows for the quick assessment of process health by tracking the time it takes for processes to respond to requests from other methods or clients – regardless of resource consumption.
- The tool measures metrics at the TCP level, meaning code-level visibility isn’t required to measure process responsiveness; Dynatrace only needs insight into inter-process communication to gather all the information.
- A significant advantage of this tool is that its responsiveness metrics are based on TCP communication. As a result, it is virtually technology-agnostic; users can gain insight into any application and technology as long as it runs on a TCP-based infrastructure.
- It can monitor Riak alongside a selection of almost 600 products ranging from cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure to containers like Docker and Prometheus; apart from integrating into the network seamlessly, the tool can also monitor Riak relative to its digital environment.
- Users can keep track of all processes and not just resource consumption to ensure no process is starved and results in a performance degradation; administrators can have a bird’s eye view of the entire stack for better troubleshooting, resource allocation, and resolution of issues.
- Dynatrace encourages collaboration thanks to its being a platform that can be used at any level of the stack; shareable dashboards allow for the global presentation of information – everyone from the developer up to the decision-makers can access relevant information – without the need to directly access data storage and, thus, compromising its security.
The company makes tools to monitor everything between applications and the backend servers, including Riak. As a result, it helps users secure and leverage their whole stack – regardless of infrastructure or technology in use.
Try Dynatrace FREE for 15 days.
4. Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-sourced solution that serves as a single pane of glass that gives an overview of the whole IT infrastructure stack. It can be used to monitor networks, servers, applications, and services, regardless of where they are located – on-premises or in the cloud.
Key Features:
- This highly scalable solution can be used in any infrastructure – from smart homes to multi-tenant enterprise environments.
- It is an ideal tool for distributed monitoring. It can be deployed on complex architectures and help keep an eye out from a central web interface secured with native encryption support between all components.
- Additionally, it ensures security by keeping sensitive information safe as it stores it in external vaults.
- Apart from being able to integrate well into any network architecture as it is highly flexible and Zabbix can be used to monitor a wide array of assets using its many different ways of collecting, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing it; the tool can be used in collaboration with over 250 partners and third-party technology vendors.
- The tool comes with the company’s high availability solution to ensure data is available at all times and that data loss is avoided.
The Zabbix monitoring tool has a set of tools and templates to help monitor Riak.
Download Zabbix for FREE.
5. AppPerfect
Although AppPerfect offers a Riak monitoring tool that isn’t well-known in the market, it is a gem of a surprisingly easy to use, completely self-sufficient, and highly effective at ensuring the health of any database it is tasked with monitoring.
Key Features:
- AppPerfect Agentless Monitor serves as a Riak database monitor to keep track of the performance of the database while also providing information so proactive steps can be taken before an interruption in the business’ processes occurs – with the tool being accessible from anywhere via a browser.
- The tool is a fully server-based solution that uses information from the services running on a device to extract health and performance information for remote monitoring. As a result, there is no need for resource-intensive agents.
- It keeps track of crucial parameters like crucial read/write requests, table locks, threads information, memory consumption, and transaction rates – everything required to ensure a complete insight into a database’s optimal performance.
- Alternatively, users can choose the parameters they need or want to monitor for custom needs; they can, for example, capture data on CPU utilization, disk fetches, and memory consumption rates to gain deeper insights into unique environments or architectures.
- The users can also use the tool’s Attribute Data conversion feature to translate an attribute value into a unit they can use in operation for a custom calculated output value.
It is a “modern” tool that adheres to the “new generation” of monitoring products in that it doesn’t follow the legacy agent-based approach to monitoring. Instead, AppPerfect has a sophisticated rules engine capable of quickly sensing rule violations and sending out immediate alerts. These alerts can be sent to its dashboard, email addresses, SMS texts, or reports.
Try AppPerfect for FREE.
6. Circonus
Circonus is an enterprise-level full-stack monitoring tool. It is a SaaS platform for a unified view of how IT affects a business.
Key Features:
- The Riak plugin gathers metrics from one or more Riak instances; it then provides performance information by translating the monitored data and even forecasts trends.
- It gives an overview of the whole stack by allowing users to couple the database’s performance information with that captured from network monitoring for complete business intelligence reporting, visualization, and fault detection.
- It has a customizable dashboard that reports analytics results in real-time to ensure accurate and on-time decision making; administrative users, on the other hand, can view the health of the database, identify potential issues, and discover insights and trends for proactive issues avoidance.
- They can automate anomaly detection thanks to analytics that learn the behavior of data over time and detect when real-time data is not behaving as expected – or analyze historical behaviors using even more built-in analytics tools and an extensive statistical toolkit to see opportunities for optimizing performance.
- Users can create dashboards from scratch or programmatically generate them using APIs for an even more hands-on customized monitoring experience; the information can be shared among multiple teams for collaborative monitoring of large-scale architectures.
- Data can be converted into meaningful information in heatmaps or histograms – both visual representations of analysis results that make it easy to catch anomalies and issues.
The tool collects information from Riak in JSON format using the database’s native interface to pull statistical data on its performance.
Try Circonus FREE for 60 days.
7. Riemann
Riemann is an open-source tool for monitoring distributed systems that aggregates event data from applications and databases – including Riak – running on any infrastructure and into single data streams. The tool integrates with Graphite for the visualization of data. It can also be interfaced with the Sinatra app for a complete system overview.
Key Features:
- Riemann TCP and UDP protocols to track events and a network event stream processor, which makes it perfect for latent analytics, metrics, and alerting; it is ideal for integrated monitoring of diverse systems.
- The tool is configured using Clojure programming, making its syntax concise, regular, and extendable; it is a program that makes it flexible and customizable enough to implement on uniquely configured architectures.
- Devices and applications are monitored “poll” or push out their events to the tool, making them visible immediately, without stressing the infrastructure.
- It sends out alerts on exceptions, downtimes, latency, and spikes – users can configure what they receive as notifications with a choice of including as much, or as little, information about singular or multiple events included in messages sent out via SMS and phone alerts, for example.
Riemann has low latency and is ideal for distributed systems. It uses a powerful stream processing language to track millions of events per second.
Download Riemann for FREE.
Leverage and monitor your Riak database
We have just seen that Riak can bring an enhanced data storage and retrieval capability to your business. As a result, your network’s performance doesn’t have to suffer from resource-intensive monitoring tools to keep your database healthy.
This is why we advise you to leverage one of the seven best tools for Riak database monitoring. We would like to hear your thoughts on this – leave us a comment below.
