Benchmarking Density and Efficiency

The reality is while thousands of NuoDB databases can be managed by a single Moonshot System, most of these databases are hibernated. This essentially means that the database is available but there is no active load (sql operations) against it. As soon as a hibernated database receives load it becomes an active database and vice versa. In the other direction, databases that become especially active may be “bursted” off of the system.

With all this in mind, our focus from a user interface perspective was to provide a dashboard that enables users to get a macro view of a Moonshot System’s status while easily providing options to drill down to more detailed items of interest. We wanted to highlight a couple of key metrics like total utilization and available capacity. In other words, make this less about active management and more about simplifying a system administrator’s effort to understand how well-provisioned they are.

What is utilization percentage? At a high level, utilization percentage is a NuoDB metric to measure the amount of actively used system resources. The lower the percentage, the higher the capacity and vice versa. What is the difference between system utilization and burstable utilization? We support the ability to to run databases on a separate system when a specific database’s load becomes sufficiently high, so system utilization is the amount of resources being actively consumed across the entire Moonshot System while burstable utilization is the amount of resources being actively off-loaded to separate servers.

This heat map lets you watch for patterns in utilization of your Moonshot System. Depending on the kind of databases being hosted or associated user load it will be possible to observe different utilization characteristics over time. This helps highlight how effectively resources are being used, and quickly calls-out any problem spots.

Underneath the heat map we show two top 10 lists. The first, on the left, shows the top 10 Moonshot Servers based on their total utilization. This should correlate with the ‘hottest’ colors in the heat map. The other top 10 list shows the most active databases based on their load percentage. This lets you pinpoint which databases are driving activity and on which server. In practice, this lets a systems administrator focus on only those databases that are using the most resources or only those servers that are behaving differently that the rest of the system.

You may have noticed that we aren’t explicitly itemizing the thousands of hibernated or active databases in the user interface. This was intentionally done to put the focus on the most active and relevant items which enables administrators to make decisions faster. In such a dense system, we think that management is more about visualizing the most interesting elements and letting the automation do its job.

If you want to see these views in action we’ve got some short video clips of the web interfaces. We hope these will help you see what we think the management experience is for using NuoDB at massive scale on a Moonshot System, and why we think we’re taking a powerful system and making the administration experience very easy. Database redundancy

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Sources: http://www.nuodb.com/techblog/2013/04/09/an-enterprise-management-ui-for-project-moonshot/