Introducing New Feature - Spotlight Cloud Database Growth Report

Spotlight Cloud Reports use up to a year’s worth of data to produce long-term trend analysis on your database. Professional Subscription users can take advantage of these reports by accessing and sharing the growth rate and size of their databases. This information provides users the capability of capacity planning, forecasting growth, and managing storage.

Database Growth Report

The Database Growth Report is a storage report that displays aggregated data along with detailed information about your databases over the selected time frame.

Similar to other Spotlight Cloud reports, you have options to filter the data by a specific Diagnostic Server, a specific connection, or a set of connections within a specified time range.

There’s a banner at the top of this particular report that consists of five head cards. These cards show aggregated data over the chosen time frame.

1. The first card shows the total used and allocated spaces of all databases. 
2. The second one shows the number of databases with the risk of being at 100% full within 30 days.
3. The third card shows the number of databases that grew more than 30% over the selected time frame.
4. The fourth shows the number of databases that haven't utilized 60% or less of their allocated space. This is an indication of potential space to be utilized.
5. The last card displays the number of deleted databases.

A great feature in this report is that you can highlight each card and will display the identified database(s) for that particular aggregated data. For example, if I click the Most Underutilized card, that's going to show me the list of databases on the Database Size chart. In this example, I have seven databases shown that are underutilized. You can also do the same with the fastest growing databases.

You have two charts in this reporting feature. The first is called the Database Size chart. It is a bar chart that itemizes your databases and it gives you two sets of datasets. One is based on your data files and the other on your log file. It shows you the used space and free space for each set. It's colorized by blue and green accordingly; blue being for the data file sizes and green being for the log file sizes. What's nice about this chart is that you can hover over each bar and that will show you the metric of the used and free space for each file.

The other chart in this reporting feature is the Space Used Over Time chart. It is a trend analysis type chart where it shows you the growth of your database over time. In this report, you can click on a database on the Database Size chart, and the Over Time chart will show you the amount of total use and total free space over time. You can also hover over each day to see that metric for your database.

At the bottom of the report, you have a grid that lists each file based on the type for your entire connection. You can also filter the grid by a specific database. The data grid includes the name of the file, the location, the size, and the growth rate of the file. It also shows you the maximum size that was configured for that file.

Users can also export and share this report with their teams. 

Spotlight Cloud users can view this report and based on the current size and the growth rate adjust them accordingly in order to manage their database space capacities at the most optimal level. The report overall is a nice way of capacity management, forecasting growth, underutilized areas of review, and identifying which database has the fastest-growing problematic areas. 

If space management is key then this is your guide.  Does your database(s) have too much or too little free space? It gives you an overall indication of where you would need to review storage a little bit better and more efficiently. 

View this video for an in-depth look at how this feature works.