Database administrators need tools for database maintenance, performance optimization, and configuration as well as creating a highly available supportive infrastructure. EnterpriseDB (EDB) leads the industry in creating best-in-class Postgres tools to support DBAs with their mission critical enterprise deployments. One of the most widely used suites is the EDB Management Suite, which has been recently updated to be compatible with PostgreSQL 10 and EDB Postgres Advanced Server 10. Two of the tools in the suite also have added security, alerting, and customization capabilities.
The EDB Postgres Management Suite consists of:
- EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager (PEM), which provides a single graphical user interface where DBAs and developers can easily administer, monitor, and tune large Postgres deployments.
- EDB Postgres Failover Manager (EFM), which monitors the members of a Postgres cluster, identifies and verifies database failures quickly and reliably, and if needed promotes a standby node to become the cluster master and issues alerts.
- EDB Postgres Backup and Recovery Tool (BART), which implements retention policies and point-in-time recovery requirements for large-scale Postgres deployments.
EDB EFM and EDB BART are critical disaster recovery tools, required for creating highly available, mission critical database architectures. EDB PEM can integrate with tools to create a cohesive ecosystem that can be easily managed from a single interface with a rich set of APIs and alerts for management and monitoring.
Adding more advanced capabilities for alerting was central to the updates in EDB PEM 7.2, now generally available. In response to user feedback, EDB added two key alerting mechanisms to the new EDB PEM 7.2:
Detailed Information: Upon receiving alerts from the system through email or the dashboard, DBAs are now able to access the detailed alert information in the dashboard by default, and can extend or customize the details returned with a simple query. Watch a 2-minute demo of this new feature on the Postgres user forum Postgres Rocks.
Auto Alert: Using alert templates for which “auto create” is set to true, EDB PEM will automatically configure an alert when a new object (agent/server) is added, and will remove it when an existing object (agent/server) is deleted or dropped. The alerts can also be automatically configured on existing objects, after the “auto create” flag is set to true for alert templates. Watch a 4-minute demo of this new feature on the Postgres user forum Postgres Rocks.
EDB PEM 7.2 also enhances security so that DBAs charged with managing many Postgres deployments have greater control over team member access to the individual components of the tool itself. EDB PEM is a powerful tool and beyond monitoring and alerting, it features probes for auditing, controls for managing capacity, and a tuning wizard, among other functions. Further, these capabilities can be scaled to many individual databases.
Role-Based Access: DBAs wanted more granular controls over assigning access to the components within EDB PEM. With 7.2, DBAs now can assign roles for who on their team can view the dashboard or access read-only views of some features but cannot access or configure other capabilities like Alerts, Probes, Capacity Manager, or Tuning Wizard. Access to components is now role-based, with inheritance for roles with parent-child relationships. Watch a 5-minute demo of this new feature on the Postgres user forum Postgres Rocks.
These are just a few highlights of the updates in EDB PEM v7.2, which emphasized security, advanced alerting, and easing the tasks of DBAs who must manage large-scale mission critical deployments.
The updates in the EDB EFM 3.0 emphasized customization. The new version, now generally available, allows DBAs to invoke user-created scripts before and after a failover on any node. The new version also enables DBAs to instruct EDB EFM to shut down the database in certain scenarios, create custom scripts for monitoring the health of a cluster, and specify a location to which agent log files are to be written. These are just a few of the enhancements that EDB engineers added to EDB EFM 3.0, giving DBAs greater flexibility and control over their infrastructure.
Visit our website to learn more about the tools in the EDB Postgres Management Suite, or send an email to info@edbpostgres.com.
Marc Linster is Senior Vice President of Product Development at EnterpriseDB.
