All-new Vertica Advisor report designed to improve health of customers’ analytics

As Vertica’s Vice President for Customer Success, I wanted to let you know that the Vertica Advisor report has been recently updated to help Vertica customers understand their database and usage, and to get the most from their analytical investments.

If you are not familiar with the Vertica Advisor report, it is a Database Health Check Tool that runs approximately 80 queries to assess a customer’s database. The goal is ensuring our customers are following best practices guidelines, plus identifying any environmental issues such as system configuration, network latency, memory, and resource usage.

Check out the following enhancements to Vertica Advisor.

Changes to the Home page

• We’ve added a “Checkout new Vertica Features” highlight, to spotlight a few of the new features of the most recent product version, along with a link to the documentation page.
• There’s now search functionality for the report, so users can go quickly to the desired section.
• There’s now a Health Score box to indicate if your database is following Vertica best practices. The Rating is a calculation based on the recommendations made and the impact on the database or environment. The lower the number of recommendations, the higher the score rating. This feature is currently in Beta as we improve the underlying indicators. As reports are collected, it will compare your current and previous reports and display a trend value.
• The Date, Case ID, and Database name now appear in a rotation box at the top right of the page.

Shown here are just two of the new features in the improved Vertica Advisor. Keep
abreast of new Vertica features in each product update; and learn the
Health Score of your own Vertica database implementation.

Recommendations Page

The Recommendations page consolidates all the recommended information onto one page.  It now shows the Summary of the Recommended Actions and Recommendation History.

• The Recommendation Actions will list recommendation in three categories: Critical, Warning, and Suggestion.
• The Recommendation History is a comparison of two reports. It will only have data if more than one report has been collected.
  • It will provide the Health Score changes over time.
  • A detailed table that reports a comparison of the current and previous report, noting if the issue was New or Resolved.

Other improvements

1. The dmesg Errors section now displays the date and time of reported issues.
2. There’s a new section to indicate if an AntiVirus software is running on the system.
3. The Stability Indicators section contains a Memory Report section. This report will indicate if a system has run out of memory and thus a MemoryReport.log file was generated.
4. For Vertica implementations with a large number of nodes, there is now a “node name” filter drop down on some of the applicable pages.

How do I get a report?

You can open a support case asking for a Vertica Advisor report, and the Support Team will provide you with the steps.

I want to thank the Solution Architects and Support team members for the feedback provided to the team. Thanks to Shrirang Kamat, Rakesh Bankula and Abhi Thakur for the input and query improvements. A special thanks to Narendra Prabhu for all the work he has done to improve the Advisor and the bring it to the next level.

The team has been hard at work improving the quality of the queries running and the data we are collecting to be more informative to our customer base as well as providing us greater insight on customer usage.

We love feedback, so don’t be shy.  Let us know what you think! You can reach me directly at amiller@vertica.com.