MonitDB: a Customizable API for Monitoring Heterogeneous Databases

Abstract

NoSQL technology provides specialized solutions for specific data models and is as such often combined in polyglot persistence implementations. The technological heterogeneity in monitoring APIs and inspection capabilities complicates the management of such storage architectures, and this is further exacerbated by their distributed deployment. More specifically, (i) the use of a combination, e.g., in a multi-cloud context, requires extensive knowledge of these technologies and their APIs, which results in increased application complexity and further leads to technology or vendor lock-in, and (ii) relying solely on a generalistic approach for monitoring different databases falls short in providing in-depth inspection of an individual database.

In this paper, we present MonitDB, a uniform API that uses a hybrid approach (a combination of both generalistic and specialistic) for monitoring different types of databases. The approach adopted by MonitDB covers a broad range of databases in terms of a set of common monitoring metrics and also gives more detailed visibility and insights into key metrics for each specific database. At its core, MonitDB is (i) extensible both in terms of new database technologies and monitoring metrics, (ii) configurable (through policies) in scheduling specific monitoring metrics from each of the supported databases, and (iii) customizable in terms of the type of data monitored (i.e. monitoring metrics) and also a performance by simply changing parameters, and as such without storing the measurements in the underlying database of MonitDB.

We have validated MonitDB in a working prototype implementation and conducted an extensive evaluation, the results of which confirm the extensibility and configurability benefits, which are achieved with an acceptable performance overhead (around 1% for insert and 9% for read operations).