Continuing with our MongoDB monitoring series, today we are releasing Cacti Performance Graphing templates and unit tested data sources for MongoDB. These are built on top of Baron Schwartz's excellent Cacti Graph framework found here (http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates). This framework allows you to define graphs via a simple (relatively) perl file and to create testable data sources for your graphs. I highly recommend it.

There has been a lot of talk about No-SQL databases recently, especially in the Drupal community. One of the most popular being MongoDB, due to its easy interface, feature-full design and speed. Use of MongoDB and No-SQL in general is only going to increase in the coming months.

At Tag1, we have been working on a few projects with MongoDB as a central infrastructure component. Due to this, we have come upon one of Mongo's problems, youth and because of youth a lack of good tools around it. Monitoring in particular is a complete vacuum. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing the first round of tools we have developed to monitor and test MongoDB, the first being a Nagios Plugin called check_mongo.

I began porting the dba module to Drupal 7 as an opportunity to learn more about the new database abstraction layer. In this upcoming Drupal release, our database layer is now built upon the PHP Data Objects (PDO) data-access abstraction layer, introducing new syntax and symantecs into writing queries with Drupal. A powerful new query builder makes it possible to easily write queries that run on any database type supported by Drupal, currently including MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

The dba module was always intended to be a useful tool for any database administrator, and toward that end I have recently merged in mysqlreport functionality which utilizes MySQL's server statistics to offer an overview of server health and performance. As an enhancement, I also merged in the knowledge shared in this earlier Tag1 Consulting article, so now problem areas detected in the mysqlreport output are automatically highlighted along with some useful help text offering tips on better tuning your database.