For most DBAs, the workday doesn’t start with a single dashboard. It starts with several, each with its own alerting logic, its own blind spots, and its own story about what’s wrong. Somewhere in the gap between those tools is the actual answer.
Graham McMillan, CTO of Redgate Software, has spent years watching this play out across enterprise teams. His vantage point in managing both product strategy and internal operations gives him a clear view of where the friction lives. And according to Redgate’s 2026 State of the Database Landscape Report, it tends to cluster around the same three problems: inconsistent practices, fragmented visibility, and unclear ownership.
Redgate works with more than 200,000 database professionals, offering numerous solutions to help organizations manage their databases throughout the Database DevOps lifecycle, which means McMillan and David Gummer, Chief Product Officer, are well-positioned to give us a closer look at what’s driving each one, and what DBAs can do about it.
At a surface level, inconsistent practices, fragmented visibility, and unclear ownership may read like organizational issues. In practice, they show up as very specific friction points in a contributor’s day.
A Deeper Look at the Problem
As database estates become more complex, 64% of organizations are finding it challenging to apply consistent practices across environments, even as security and governance become increasingly important. Weak practices can stem from overreliance on individual knowledge and expertise rather than on systematic data checks and security controls.
For contributors, this often translates into “tribal knowledge” becoming a dependency. The person who understands a specific alerting script or deployment nuance becomes a bottleneck. When they are unavailable, resolution times increase, not because the issue is complex, but because the system lacks standardized, visible processes.
According to Redgate’s data, teams appear to favor managed approaches, with Platform-as-a-Service deployments now preferred over Infrastructure-as-a-Service, at 37% vs 21%.
This shift adds another layer of operational overhead: DBAs are no longer just managing databases, but also navigating different abstractions, APIs, and limitations imposed by each platform. The mental model required to troubleshoot issues is no longer consistent across systems.
Next, monitoring practices appear fragmented according to Redgate’s data, with 31% relying on scripts and 23% using home-built tools. It’s this discrepancy that may be linked to issues with consistent practices and shared visibility.
In practical terms, fragmented monitoring means alert fatigue without clarity. Contributors receive notifications that signal “something is wrong” but lack the unified context needed to act quickly. Time is spent validating whether an alert is actionable, correlating it with other signals, and ruling out noise. That overhead accumulates daily.
Finally, 74% of organizations operate multiple database platforms, and of those, 31% manage at least four, some even more. This stretches management teams and may contribute to the clear ownership problem.
Ownership, in this environment, often becomes ambiguous at the worst possible moment: during an incident. A slowdown in a downstream system might originate in an upstream database owned by another team, but without shared visibility, identifying the source requires manual coordination. The cost is not just time; it is also delayed resolution and increased operational stress.
What a Fix Looks Like
Redgate’s response to this is Monitor as a SaaS edition. This system aims to alleviate issues caused by pain points, enabling oversight of fragmented estates and eliminating the operational overhead of deploying, hosting, and maintaining monitoring infrastructure.
From a contributor perspective, the value proposition is less about consolidation in theory and more about reducing the number of investigative steps required to understand a problem. A unified monitoring layer can shorten the path from alert to root cause by providing shared context across platforms.
The program enables users to monitor their entire database system in one place, aiming to eliminate the use of home-built tools and streamline visibility. It includes Monitor AI to help surface performance bottlenecks and accelerate query tuning, reducing the manual effort involved in day-to-day monitoring.
In a “before” state, a DBA might spend significant time gathering data before taking action. In an “after” state, the goal is to shift that effort toward interpretation and decision-making, rather than data collection. Whether that shift materializes depends on how effectively tooling replaces fragmented workflows rather than adding another layer.
By actively reflecting on industry issues, McMillan has positioned Redgate Software to deliver actionable solutions to industry problems. It has the potential to fix issues and improve data management processes, allowing managers to focus on stronger maintenance solutions.
For individual contributors, the more immediate metric is simpler: fewer tools to check, fewer visibility gaps, and less time spent reconstructing context during incidents.
Photo by Umnat Seebuaphan; iStock
Jordan Williams is a talented software writer who seamlessly transitioned from his former life as a semi-pro basketball player. With the same determination and focus that propelled him on the court, Jordan now crafts elegant code and develops innovative software solutions that elevate user experiences and drive technological advancements.
