MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Agent = Extensibility

I have gotten a few questions around my 7/29 blog posting on agent vs client-side products and wanted to make it clear that our decision to go with a distributed agent architecture was a strategic decision that has paved the way for us to deliver on our overall "pain point" addressing roadmap. True, building a client-side app would have meant a faster go-to-market delivery, but that path would have imposed serious limitations on our ability to address and alleviate common pain points around the use and scaling of apps on MySQL.

So what does an agent really do for us from a strategic standpoint? Without revealing too many details (well, these things have already been openly discussed with customers and presented in our MySQL UC 2008 Product roadmap session), our agent-based architecture allows us to provide:

- Freedom from a fat client **
- Minimal connections to the backend MySQL database **
- Real-time visibility and monitoring of all MySQL servers in a consolidated view **
- Real-time collection of queries and result sets **
- Independent collection of MySQL, OS, SQL for monitoring, trending, capacity planning **
- Slave aware Load Balancing of reads/writes
- Connection concentration to remove overhead of idle connections from production servers
- Autonomous, remote administration of all MySQL servers
- Server level scheduling of admin tasks, maintenance, back up, recovery, etc.
- Application data sharding across replicated slaves
- Server/App level Security and Data Auditing

Just to name a few. As I said, there are no secrets here, we have discussed all of this openly in our public webinars and at this past Spring's UC. For your day-to-day tasks, we do provide quality, client-side, GUI tools for *free* that will help you manage single servers, dev and test queries, migrate data, etc. For the more advanced things noted above, the work is better left to a distributed management solution.

As a reminder, look for the public beta of the Enterprise Monitor w/Query Analyzer to open up in the next few weeks. I will post links to the beta registration and download when it is ready to roll.