Monitoring Atlas MongoDB

MongoDB Atlas is a cloud platform-as-a-service operated by MongoDB, Inc. the producer of the open source database of the same name. Atlas is a managed MongoDB environment integrated with Amazon Cloud Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. An organization user can create a MongoDB cluster within a logical project. Some features of Atlas, such as programmatic API keys, are configured at either the organization or project level, while others, such as database users, are configured at the cluster level. Users may additionally set up billing details, rules, and database configurations within Atlas. Within a project, different clusters can be created in different cloud provider environments. Unlike some cloud providers’ MongoDB-compatible offerings, clusters created on the Atlas platform are composed of true MongoDB instances.

This section covers the following key areas:

Business Challenge

Atlas is a complex environment with a complex user interface. Atlas configuration and administration is mixed with database configuration and administration. Furthermore, settings for different components of the same type are not visible together at a glance. Slow queries, for example can only be viewed cluster by cluster, rather than across the organization. Alerting is available, but with the exception of a handful of rules, each rule must be configured for each organization and project by the Atlas user. To the extent that Atlas offers database monitoring, it offers it only for Atlas instances, not for on-premise or private cloud MongoDB installations or for DocumentDB clusters.

Performance, storage, and availability monitoring is critical to enterprise database management. Staying up to date on best practices for database performance monitoring for individual database platforms is challenging in a continually evolving technology landscape with rapid vendor and in-house development cycles. Maintaining tooling to perform automated monitoring can be both challenging and distracting for teams whose focus is on developing and operating database applications, rather than on developing database monitoring tools. These challenges are amplified in the increasingly common scenario of multi-database enterprises and teams with multiple hosting providers.

Key Features

Foglight for Atlas MongoDB is designed to provide the enterprise with a powerful tool that can act standalone or as part of broader cross-platform database monitoring requirements. To support enterprise performance, Foglight for Atlas MongoDB supports the monitoring of key components and functions including organizations, projects, clusters, instances, CPU utilization, memory usage, operations, replication, and storage.

As with all Foglight solutions, Foglight for Atlas MongoDB runs as a native Foglight process residing on the Foglight Agent Manager (FglAM) independent of both the Atlas environment and the monitored database instances. The solution leverages the Foglight Rules Engine, providing the ability to evaluate and alert on potential issues before they significantly affect performance and availability.