Key Takeaways
- Use the Splunk AI Assistant in Splunk Database Monitoring to generate detailed breakdowns of complex, normalized database queries.
- Get actionable query rewrite suggestions to increase query efficiency and decrease performance costs.
- Understand the "why" behind optimizations with step-by-step explanations of AI-driven recommendations.
We’ve already dug into the importance of database monitoring in Database Monitoring: The Complete Guide – databases are essential to our applications and services. Observability ensures these systems and the databases that back them are performant, efficient, and functioning reliably.
In our last post, we explored how to quickly identify and resolve database query issues across our entire database fleet with Splunk Database Monitoring. Now, we’re taking it a step further by using the power of the Splunk AI Assistant to quickly summarize complex queries and even get recommendations on how to optimize queries to increase efficiency and decrease performance cost.
Accessing the AI Summary
With the AI Assistant enabled, AI-powered summaries of normalized database queries become available automatically within Splunk Database Monitoring. To get started, navigate to a specific query within Splunk Database Monitoring.
Once we click into a specific query, we’ll see the Summarize button located above the query statement:
Once we select Summarize, we get a detailed breakdown of the query including:
- An explanation of the query’s primary function
- A breakdown of each statement in the query
- The specific use case or intent of the query
Boost performance with AI recommendations
Optimizing queries is a big part of getting better performance out of a database. With AI recommendations, this task becomes streamlined with AI-powered rewrite suggestions.
We can access suggestions via the AI recommendations tab within a selected query:
The AI recommendations don’t just tell you that a query is slow, it provides specific optimizations with a fully optimized SQL query. Recommendations are also fully explained, step-by-step so we get insight into the reasoning behind the optimizations:
Here, it’s recommended that we avoid using a SELECT * statement so we don’t retrieve all columns from the tables unnecessarily. Full table scans are very slow, especially with JOINs, so the revised query should be significantly faster. The best part is that we don’t need to remember all these rules thanks to the AI assistant’s recommendations and explanations.
Wrap up
Combining the deep visibility of Splunk Database Monitoring with the intelligence of the Splunk AI Assistant allows you to move from identifying problems with database performance to optimizing performance in record time. By summarizing complex query statements and applying expert-level recommendations for optimizations, you can ensure your database fleet runs leaner and faster.
Already a Splunk Observability Cloud customer and ready to try out Splunk Database Monitoring? Contact our sales team to try it out today.
New to Splunk Observability Cloud? Start with a free 14-day trial.
Resources
- Using the AI Assistant with Splunk Database Monitoring
- Unlock Database Monitoring with Splunk Observability Cloud tech talk
- Splunk Database Monitoring
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