When you're trying to understand your systems and why they behave as they do, one of the most powerful questions is "what changed?" or "what's different?" We've offered this capability for years in VividCortex, and now we've added it to the more recent Explorer feature so you can interrogate your databases and discover what's new and different about them.

You can use the controls on an Explorer chart to add a time comparison within the chart. Adding this feature to Explorer lets you do two things you couldn't do previously with time comparisons:

1. You can perform comparisons over time on any metrics in your systems, not just the ones you could view in the Profiler previously‚ such as top-ranked lists of MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/Redis queries.
2. You can set the comparison interval differently in each chart. This also has the benefit of letting you compare a chart, top-list, or metrics over multiple time …

Many of our customers have asked us to integrate with Grafana, the popular open platform for analytics and monitoring. The wait is over: we’ve released a plugin that lets you retrieve and display VividCortex metrics in your own Grafana dashboard. With this integration, you can combine metrics and dashboards from all of your systems and tools into a single source of truth that your team is already familiar with, giving them the ability to explore and use VividCortex’s data without having to learn a new tool.

We believe in empowering everyone to access performance data, removing barriers to understanding. It’s been our experience that when entire teams find it comfortable and familiar to inspect database and data-tier performance and behavior, adoption spreads quickly and there’s a lot more value. Special people with special knowledge gradually transfer their skills and abilities to whole teams, who are then able to ship …

Many of our customers have asked us to integrate with Grafana, the popular open platform for analytics and monitoring. The wait is over: we’ve released a plugin that lets you retrieve and display VividCortex metrics in your own Grafana dashboard. With this integration, you can combine metrics and dashboards from all of your systems and tools into a single source of truth that your team is already familiar with, giving them the ability to explore and use VividCortex’s data without having to learn a new tool.

We believe in empowering everyone to access performance data, removing barriers to understanding. It’s been our experience that when entire teams find it comfortable and familiar to inspect database and data-tier performance and behavior, adoption spreads quickly and there’s a lot more value. Special people with special knowledge gradually transfer their skills and abilities to whole teams, who are then able to ship …

We’ve improved VividCortex to help you focus on what matters most in your data tier’s performance, configuration, and behavior. Now it’s easier for you to be more awesome for your team and your customers, without needing to actually be an expert!

Navigate to the Health section of the app (clicky clicky), and the first thing you’ll see is a comprehensive set of recommendations for anything amiss in your configuration, queries, and more. This applies both to the database and to the operating system. Our guiding principle is: we’ll show you what you need to know, what you need to do, and how to do it (as much as possible).

You can filter, mute, and drill into any of the recommendations to learn more. These expert insights are based on our own years of combined experience, as well as what you, our customers, have taught us. The result is instant …

VividCortex is designed with two key scalability requirements in mind: it must perform well in large environments with many hosts, and the UI must help users understand and inspect those environments easily. The universal time selector, the host filter, and other features let you start with a top-level summary, grasp what’s happening in your entire environment no matter how many hosts, and then drill into hosts, time ranges, queries, and metrics of interest. We’ve enhanced our charting and graphing capabilities to make this same zoom-in-drill-down inspectability easier, too.

When you load a charts dashboard, you’ll see charts that contain one line per metric. For example, if I view my MongoDB dashboard and use the top-navigation filter to quickly limit the view to “checkpoints,” I’ll see the following single chart.

Notice how the subtitle says “Average of 5 hosts.” Each line on this chart is an average of 5 hosts’s …

VividCortex now offers custom dashboards, which are collections of charts you can curate as you wish. Custom dashboards are shared across your team, so they're a great way to ensure everyone has access to the metrics that you use to monitor and inspect system status and health. And you can give them meaningful names, which is one of only two hard things in computer science, so your dashboards can be full of win.

In the "Choose Dashboards" navigation menu item, there's a new option to "Add Custom Dashboard." Type in a name, and then you'll have an empty custom dashboard. You can also clone an existing dashboard (either custom or prebuilt) to get started.

When you're viewing a custom dashboard, it's easy to add a chart to it. Just start typing and you'll get autocomplete suggestions based on chart and metric names. There's turnkey charts for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, operating system metrics, and much more.

Queries can be slow or resource-heavy for many reasons, but one of the most common is that the table doesn't have a good index for the query. This is true for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and especially for MongoDB. Adding an index where it's missing is often a night-and-day improvement, as shown in this screenshot of a query's performance. The index was added midway through the time range, and the query got dramatically faster:

(That image is from Rocio Delgado's Query Performance At Scale presentation about process and tooling at GitHub).

Discovering queries that can benefit from adding indexes is typically a task for an expert, but at VividCortex we've made it possible for anyone, even a novice, to figure out which queries to examine. Our smart algorithms prioritize which queries can benefit most from speedups, and then look at which of those …

We're excited to announce that VividCortex support for Windows is now available! With VividCortex, Windows users can benefit from the first unified suite of performance monitoring tools specifically designed for today's large-scale, polyglot persistence tier. 

We know that Windows support is vital for many large organizations with sweeping, established systems. Now, government, health care, university, and finance organizations who rely on Windows can employ the powerful insight of VividCortex.

With features including 1-second granularity, behavior-based monitoring, chat-integration, and custom dashboards, VividCortex has the ability to monitor hundreds of thousands of instances in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and Amazon Aurora. It’s the tool that lets IT teams see their databases with new confidence and reach their highest levels of efficiency and precision.

We're especially excited to serve …

We've talked a lot about the high-resolution data we capture, but if you haven't experienced it yourself, it might be a little abstract. Here, look at the difference between 1-second and 1-minute data.

Are your monitoring systems glossing over important detail with low-frequency data?

All of our metrics are in 1-second granularity. That's 60x more data points per minute than most monitoring tools. It's 120x more data points per second than MongoDB Monitoring Service's premium paid tier. It's 500x more data points per minute than MySQL Enterprise Monitor at its default settings.

It's enough detail to see 1-second server stalls you will never find otherwise. This gives you the ability to proactively find and stop problems that will become much more serious over time.

And this data is not only realtime but …

We're thrilled to announce VividCortex's new partnership with Percona -- the only company that delivers enterprise-class solutions for both MySQL and MongoDB across traditional and cloud-based platforms. As part of the partnership, Percona will resell VividCortex as a value-added monitoring solution, and Percona's own support technicians and managed service administrators will have VividCortex at their fingertips, to assist in serving and optimizing their customers’ applications.  

Including VividCortex as part of Percona's services will provide enterprise users of Percona Server for MySQL and Percona Server for MongoDB with the safest, most streamlined, and precise method for monitoring high performance data systems. Percona customers who opt for VividCortex will enjoy improved visibility and greater insights into their database performance …