First time co-host Jan Kleinert joins Mark Mirchandani this week to talk about database observability and the cool tools that make it possible. Morgan McLean and Nimesh Bhagat describe database observability, which uses metrics, logs, and other tools to help users understand the health of your database.

We talk about Object Relational Mappers and the challenges with using these for debugging database performance. SQL Commenter helps database observability in two ways: it is both a library and a standard, Nimesh tells us. He describes the process for us, detailing exactly how SQL Commenter effects projects. Recently, SQL Commenter was donated to OpenTelemetry to augment the observability offerings, create an application standard, and make it easier for developers to use a variety of different tools and languages. Engineers can get end-to-end traces no matter which database technologies they use.

Morgan tells us about Splunk and how information from SQL Commenter is taken into Splunk and used. Backend data like metrics from Cloud Monitoring and client libraries can be correlated together with SQL Commenter and brought into Splunk for full stack observability. Nimesh offers client examples to help us understand how these useful tools integrate for optimal observability. He tells us about the databases and ORMs supported by SQL Commenter. Our guests and co-host Jan give tips to help our listeners get started with SQL Commenter and talk about what they’re looking forward to in the future of observability.

Nimesh Bhagat

Nimesh is a product manager at Google Cloud, he leads Database Observability. He has worked across engineering and product roles, building highly available and high performance enterprise infrastructure used by Fortune 500 companies. His passion lies in combining powerful infrastructure with simple user experience so that every business and developer can build software at scale and velocity.

Morgan McLean

Morgan is Director of Product Management at Splunk and co-creator of OpenCensus / OpenTelemetry.

Cool things of the week

Google Cloud Innovators site
Redesigning the Cloud SDK + CLI for easier development blog
- GCP Podcast Episode 291: Redesigning the Cloud SDK and CLI with Wael Manasra and Cody Oss podcast
What is Active Assist? video
- GCP Podcast Episode 235: Active Assist with Chris Law + MariaDB SkySQL with Robert Hedgepeth podcast

Interview

SQL Commenter site
Sequelize site
SQL Alchemy site
ADO.net site
GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast
OpenTelemetry site
Splunk site
Cloud Monitoring site
Cloud Spanner site
Cloud SQL site
Cloud Trace site
Sqlcommenter now extending the vision of OpenTelemetry to databases blog

Hosts

Mark Mirchandani and Jan Kleinert

SQL Commenter with Nimesh Bhagat and Morgan McLean

Google Cloud Platform Podcast