Maxime Drobot

23 September 2024

Behind Redgate Monitor’s Curtain: Eight Engineering Teams, One Customer-Centric Vision

Redgate Monitor has been a trusted tool since 2008. It is used by thousands of happy customers and new ones join our community every day. With such an established monitoring tool and a growing user base, the teams working on the tool always strive to:

1. Keep it relevant: database estates keep evolving, as does their usage and the regulatory environment. Redgate Monitor keeps evolving to support our customers’ databases, wherever they are.
2. Keep listening to users: our users constantly share great ideas to make Redgate Monitor even better, and while some requests are specific to certain organizations, we strive to incorporate as much valuable feedback as possible.
3. Keep innovating and surprising: we want to stay on the edge of innovation and constantly strive to provide DBAs with new capabilities that help them keep their databases fast and secure.

How can we keep tackling these three challenges? At Redgate, we believe we can do it by putting the customers at the heart of our product development process and by investing in engineering. This allows us to continuously improve and expand the product. Let’s peek behind the curtain into how the Redgate Monitor group works.

A growing engineering group

The product managers for Redgate Monitor need to align its commercial development with what our customers need. They work from a rich list of ideas, from small tweaks to game-changing features. With so many things we could be working on, prioritization and resources are essential. That’s why Redgate has ramped up investment in engineering, now boasting 8 dedicated teams focused on different aspects of database monitoring.

Coordination and clearly defined objectives are essential to keep development work running smoothly, ensure teams don’t tread on each other’s toes, and keep Redgate Monitor evolving, without creating new issues. Our teams regularly present the work they’ve been doing and the improvements they’ve introduced, and exchange ideas. Each software engineer is invited to review and provide candid feedback on the work done within the Monitor group.

We also apply best DevOps practices and use Redgate’s own tools to keep us working efficiently on the code, in parallel. One of our core practices is to release frequently (at least once a week) so that we introduce changes to our customers quickly and can gather feedback that will help us improve and iterate.

For our users, built with our users

To keep the Monitor development teams focused, their objectives are framed around addressing the needs of database professionals and solving user problems. Each team then works out a technical solution to fulfil their objective.

One central tenet to Redgate Monitor product development is talking to our users. Each team, alongside their product manager and designer, dives deep into understanding the problems database professionals, such as DBAs, face. They do this by engaging directly with them, testing ideas, and iterating based on feedback. Teams supplement their research with direct feedback from User Voice, forums, surveys and issues raised through Customer Support. Knowledge and customer feedback are shared between teams to inform each team’s objective.

This frequent interaction between Redgate teams and our community is something unique to Redgate. It is instrumental in keeping teams focused on the problems DBAs need us to solve and gives us a purpose which aligns all 8 teams.

So, what are those eight teams working on now?

Among the many things we want to add to Redgate Monitor, the 8 teams are currently looking at:

• Improving the core value of Redgate Monitor: relevant alerting, useful metrics and performance data to keep your database estate healthy and ensure optimal performance
• Increasing coverage: after expanding from SQL Server to include PostgreSQL in 2023, we’re now extending support to Oracle, MySQL, and MongoDB.
• Security and auditing: this is a new set of capabilities, focusing on user permissions and configuration checks, and we plan to add more features soon that will strengthen your database security and compliance
• Performance: we continuously improve our codebase to keep Redgate Monitor secure and fast, as well as your databases and servers.

While these are the major initiatives that are being worked on by the engineering team, there is also a constant stream of smaller pieces of work that we introduce: tweaks to the user interface, small improvements to a metric, better documentation, and so on. This means that, each week, there is always something new being introduced in the latest released version of Redgate Monitor.

One last thing

We keep adding new cool things to Redgate Monitor. If you haven’t seen it in a while, you should look at our live monitoring demo and maybe download a trial for yourself. We would also be delighted to discuss Monitor with you and show what it is capable of – please contact info@red-gate.com.

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