Nine-year old Blue Medora recently morphed from being a company that adds software to existing performance monitoring systems, to one that creates its own monitoring system exclusively for databases.

SelectStar, announced today, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that combines database and cloud infrastructure monitoring to help database administrators and DevOps teams track and optimize critical database performance and metrics, said Mike Kelly, Blue Medora's CTO.

By taking a lot of other product extensions from the past and bundling it into a single product, SelectStar was born, Kelly said.

“Our customers are seeing a shift in needing only a couple databases to needing dozens with multiple combinations of architectures, whether it be cloud, hybrid, or traditional on-premises equipment,” Kelly said. “While there has been a big shift into application-centric monitoring systems, they still don’t go deep enough into database monitoring.”

There are a few companies that focus on database monitoring, but the ones that do are more focused on traditional on-premises database performance, Kelly said.  Blue Medora focuses heavily on the performance of both traditional and virtualized databases.

He said there are multiple benefits from being able to deploy SelectStar as a SaaS. The most beneficial is being able to have a customer up and running within 20 minutes, which can't be done with traditional database monitoring systems. Also, users are able to scale up or down as needed. Kelly claims SelectStar will reduce resolution time and will eliminate the need for specialists, inevitably reducing costs.

“I think if you want to be successful as a monitoring company, you need to take a SaaS approach, or at least it will make things easier,” Kelly said.

SelectStar applies its monitoring and analysis capabilities to databases like Microsoft SQL Server, PostgresSQL, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, and Aurora.