The Aerospike Database is an in-memory open-source distributed key-value NoSQL database that enables businesses to act in real-time and cost-effectively scale their data. Unlike traditional NoSQL databases, Aerospike provides predictable performance, scales to process petabytes of data, and uses a cross-datacenter replication technique to create a globally distributed real-time database.

Our new Aerospike integration provides vital KPIs which can help your team monitor the health and efficiency of the database. Alongside vital KPIs, this integration offers a variety of ready-made dashboards that allow your team to visualize vital metrics and gain further insights into the performance of the database.

Throughout this article, we'll explore how your team can use this integration to uncover the answers to critical questions such as:

1. How can we ensure the high availability and performance of our aerospike database globally?
2. How can we visualize the health and efficacy of our Aerospike database?

Maintaining high availability & performance of aerospike databases

The Aerospike database system is unique in that it uses a technique known as cross-datacenter replication (XDR) to create globally distributed real-time databases. This is accomplished by the asynchronous replication of data between two or more clusters located at different geographically distributed sites. As such, it may be useful to have access to dashboards that show vital indicators of the high availability & performance of your Aerospike database globally.

Our new integration provides these dashboards and metrics, thus giving your team the confidence that the database is highly available. Metrics such as the Aerospike XDR ship success -- an indicator of the number of records that have been successfully shipped to remote Aerospike clusters -- and the Aerospike XDR global last ship time -- an indicator for the last ship time for XDR across the cluster -- become available in dashboards and can be monitored across time. The dashboards additionally allow you to track metrics like Aerospike XDR lag and Aerospike namespace balance so as to have greater insight into the performance of the database and its ability to distribute partitions to all nodes globally.

To be up-to-date on current issues within your system, our integration also allows you to create monitors that alert you when critical KPIs fail to meet performance standards. Moreover, when these monitors notify you of unusual activity, you can investigate the metrics and take further action to determine the root cause alongside assessing possible remediation strategies. For example, you can set up monitors and alerts that track the XDR lag time so your team can be notified when the XDR lag time has consistently exceeded a few seconds.

Consider the following:

Here we have three different snapshots of the XDR lag time for a node in our Aerospike database. Let's see what happens when we set all three lag times to a number greater than 5 seconds.

As we can see, when all three lag times are greater than 5 seconds, we are notified by an alert. This alert may indicate network connectivity issues or other errors at a destination cluster. Your team can then investigate further and take action to remediate the issue.

Visualizing the health of your Aerospike Database

Alongside the metrics we previously mentioned, our integration gathers metrics that can provide an overview of the health and efficacy of your system. These metrics can be visualized through summarized dashboards. For example, metrics such as the Aerospike client connections and Aerospike client connections opened can give your team insight into whether clients can establish a connection with a node in your database.

Additionally, our integration can help you to reconstruct a detailed picture of the state of your system by providing dashboards that give you insight into system resources. This is especially important given that the Aerospike database can act as an in-memory database -- storing data fully in RAM (random-access-memory). Knowing this, it may become useful to have metrics that monitor RAM usage and performance. Our integration allows your team to access and view metrics such as system free memory, heap efficiency, and Memory data bytes, which can help evaluate whether your system has sufficient resources to handle current workloads.

Getting started with the Aerospike integration

With comprehensive metrics and out-of-the-box dashboards, Datadog provides deep insights into the health and performance of your Aerospike database. As we've discussed, monitors and alerts allow your team to respond rapidly to abnormal metrics so as to ensure your database's health and availability. From a broader scope, Datadog provides full visibility into your infrastructure and network, thereby allowing your team to have confidence that applications are healthy, performant, and available.

Check out our documentation to start monitoring your next application. If you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Key takeaway questions