Redis monitoring involves tracking the health and performance of your Redis databases to ensure high availability and accessibility for the data stored within them. Monitoring helps you keep a close eye on critical Redis performance metrics, provides you with in-depth insights for understanding resource utilization and capacity planning, and enables quick incident resolution in case of a performance disruption.
This blog explores the significance of monitoring Redis databases and the crucial metrics that can be measured with ManageEngine Applications Manager to ensure enhanced functioning in your business operations.
The need for Redis monitoring
Since Redis is well known as one of the fastest NoSQL databases that provide super-fast access to data storage, many companies make it a priority to adopt Redis into their business infrastructure. Known for its high efficiency, ease of use, and versatile data structure, it is the most sought-after database for performing critical business operations that involve faster access to data, such as gaming, messaging, financial services, and real-time data analytics. This being said, even the slightest disruption in Redis performance can greatly impact business operations at a larger scale, leading to loss of revenue and brand reputation very quickly.
Obtaining in-depth visibility into the performance of your Redis databases is the key to avoiding any performance degradations, and it can save you a lot of time during incident resolution. This involves tracking Redis metrics 24/7 to ensure high availability and top-notch business performance, and for this, having a robust Redis monitoring solution in place is a necessity.
Challenges in Redis monitoring
Despite being one of the fastest, high-performing NoSQL databases adopted by many business organizations, Redis does have some management challenges that are time-sensitive and can impact business outcomes on a greater scale if not addressed on time. Some of these challenges include:
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Large volumes of data: Since Redis is primarily used for its lightweight data handling capabilities, dealing with huge volumes of data simultaneously can bog down Redis performance, making it slower to respond.
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High performance maintenance: Maintaining high performance in your Redis databases 24/7 becomes mandatory to ensure speedy access to data storage, especially when it involves dealing with crucial business operations.
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Incident response: Failing to respond to Redis performance issues quickly can wreak havoc on business operations, causing unnecessary trouble for you to resolve.
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High scaling: Expanding your business operations can lead to increased data and users, forcing you to scale up your Redis database to maintain high performance.
Key metrics in Redis monitoring
Since Redis is well known for its fast and reliable access to data storage, monitoring the performance of your Redis server should be a top priority. Since it provides message broker, caching, and data storage capabilities in fast-paced business operations, the probability of experiencing a server outage is high when dealing with a huge number of requests.
To ensure your Redis database is functioning at a high speed and is highly efficient, there are a multitude of metrics that need to be monitored. Let’s take a look at some of the important metrics that can be monitored with a Redis monitoring solution, such as ManageEngine Applications Manager.
CPU usage details
CPU usage refers to the amount of CPU utilized by the processes in the Redis server. High values in CPU usage might indicate your Redis server is overworked and can affect overall performance, if left unattended. Constantly monitoring CPU usage values and analyzing usage patterns can help you understand how your Redis server is functioning overall, enabling you to optimize performance and plan capacity accordingly.
Applications Manager’s Redis monitoring aids you by constantly monitoring CPU utilization in your Redis server and providing clear visibility into metrics. It helps you analyze CPU usage patterns by providing detailed graphs into specific metrics such as system and user CPU usage, and it instantly notifies you whenever there is a spike in utilization values.
Memory usage statistics
Memory is an important component to be considered in Redis performance. Since Redis is an in-memory data store mainly used for storage, it’s vital to keep a close eye on the amount of memory consumed by your Redis servers. High memory usage can cause unwanted memory errors, stunted performance, and by extension, even lead to server disruptions.
With Applications Manager’s Redis monitoring, you can obtain detailed insights into the memory utilization of your Redis server in real time. It keeps track of various key memory components, such as used memory, used memory RSS, and peak used memory, to give you a clear idea of how each memory type is contributing to storage consumption. Furthermore, you can also track the memory fragmentation ratio of your Redis server to quickly ascertain the efficiency of memory usage, and then take steps to maintain the value within proper limits.
Connection details
Tracking the number of connections handled by the Redis server is important because it majorly contributes to the server’s load. If more clients are connected, the Redis server handles more load, which may affect its responsiveness. Since Redis is known for its fast-paced data storage, message broker, and caching capabilities, a surge in the number of clients connected to the server could occur almost instantly.
Applications Manager’s Redis monitoring makes it easier for you to gain a clear overview of the number of connections established with your Redis server with detailed stats on the individual connections split up. It provides detailed insights on the number of connected, blocked, and rejected clients along with the number of commands processed per second. This way, you can quickly identify which metrics have a surge in values and take necessary steps to mitigate them with ease.
Message broker statistics
Apart from its data storage capabilities, Redis is also used for its messaging broker features, making use of the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging model to send and receive messages via channels and patterns. Keeping track of the channels and patterns used in the pub/sub messaging model of your Redis server is important to manage communication in business applications with event-driven architectures.
With Applications Manager’s Redis monitoring, you can obtain a clear idea of the messaging queue aspects of your Redis server. It monitors the pub/sub statistics of your Redis server by tracking the global number of pub/sub channels and patterns that are present within client subscriptions to give you a clear picture of the amount of message calls your Redis server is handling.
Database activity statistics
Tracking database activities is the most crucial aspect of Redis monitoring. A large number of database calls are made to Redis servers for data storage and retrieval on a regular basis for day-to-day business operations. Since Redis is popularly known for its message broker, caching, and data store mechanisms, even the slightest failure in data storage or retrieval can cause major havoc on the business performance depending on it. Constantly keeping an eye on Redis database activities leaves no room for database failures and can save you from unexpected performance bottlenecks.
Applications Manager’s Redis performance monitoring provides in-depth visibility into the performance of your keyspace metrics, which serves as an internal dictionary for Redis to store and manage all its keys. You also get detailed insights into keyspace statistics by tracking the number of successful or failed key lookups from the keyspace dictionary, and you receive detailed stats on the number of keys that have expired or been evicted due to maximum memory limits, giving you a comprehensive understanding of the processing capacity of your Redis server. This helps you examine the impact of key expirations on system performance, helping to prevent data loss and allocate resources accordingly.
Replication details
One of the major requirements of database management systems is to perform timely replication activities for data integrity and availability. Redis takes care of syncing data from the primary Redis server to all the required secondary Redis servers, ensuring data consistency across all the replicas in the system and avoiding possible data loss due to server outages.
Applications Manager provides deep insights into the replication processes running in your Redis servers by providing details such as replication role, primary host and port, and the status of the link. It also tracks the number of secondary connections that are established with the primary server to give you a comprehensive overview of the replication process for data consistency.
Persistence details
In addition to configuring replication for your Redis servers, enabling persistence in them is equally important, serving as a safety net in case of unprecedented server failures. There are different persistence options to choose from based on various use cases, and keeping a close eye on the persistence status of those options alongside your replication metrics is crucial during unexpected failures.
Applications Manager enables you to monitor the persistence stats of your Redis server by tracking various persistent states of Redis databases and append-only files (AOFs), such as the status of the last Redis database save operation or the status of an AOF rewrite operation. These metrics can be helpful in times of disaster recovery.
Get started with Applications Manager for Redis performance monitoring
In this post, we’ve covered the need to monitor Redis key-value stores, the challenges in monitoring them, and the key metrics you can keep track of using ManageEngine Applications Manager. Along with monitoring Redis health and performance, Applications Manager provides powerful alerting and anomaly detection features as well as custom, personalized dashboards that enable you to troubleshoot Redis performance issues effectively.
Apart from Redis, Applications Manager supports monitoring the health and performance of diverse business infrastructures, including components such as servers, VMs, databases, application servers, web servers, middleware, and cloud platforms. It also provides application performance monitoring and digital experience monitoring capabilities, and it can be useful for ITOps, DevOps, and site reliability engineering teams.
If you haven’t tried Applications Manager yet, you can download a 30-day, free trial and begin monitoring Redis along with the rest of your infrastructure and applications right away.
