“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” You’ve probably heard this, and other similar UX advice, before. We are passionate believers in the idea that technology should help people solve their problems – but the focus should be on the customer not the clever tech. This is an important distinction and one we in the tech industry should never forget. History is full of brilliant inventions, scientific breakthroughs and ‘light bulb’ moments. For many new products and services, the British saying “necessity is the mother of invention” explains what drives much of this progress. People invent things because they see a problem that needs solving. This is exactly what happened to SQLTreeo founder Danny Riebeek in 2015. “We were offering managed monitoring services to multiple customers,” explains Danny. “Each had their own database environment and we had to fetch the information, monitor the alerts and assess what was happening. There was a lot of manual intervention that was costing us several hours a week. And, it wasn’t efficient; we wanted to be spending that time supporting our customers in their day-to-day business and on higher value development work.” In summary, Danny had three main issues with the database monitoring tools available at the time: They didn’t deliver all the information we needed. There was no central dashboard showing all our customers. We needed it to be faster and more accurate. Danny decided to dig deeper. He knew that other businesses probably had similar issues. He also felt that, as companies started to rely on multiple cloud-based systems, they would find it challenging to get a reliable overview and accurate metrics of all the databases running across their business. “I needed a monitoring tool that would let different environments communicate, that was efficient and did away with the manual work,” continues Danny. “I was sure other people would need it too, so I set about designing my ideal database monitoring solution.” The result is a unique, cloud-based monitoring tool that customers can use in different infrastructures and for as many users in as many countries as needed. Customers can configure the messaging system from any location and retrieve all their performance metrics from the cloud. Other benefits include the monitoring of data replications and high availability environments, and granular security features. The real test is always, ‘what do our customers think?’ “The monitoring tool is really easy to use,” says René Schreuder, SQLTreeo’s COO. “Our customers need to feel confident that their databases are working well. If there’s an issue, with the disk space for example, they need to know about it before it becomes a threat to the business. “This tool raises those red flags in one easy-to-follow dashboard. Now, you don’t need a technical background to get insider knowledge of how your database environment is running. Our customers tell us that’s a huge relief.” “Ultimately,” Danny concludes, “I wanted to design the perfect monitoring service I needed in my own business. But, it’s never finished. It’s a process of continuous improvement as we incorporate customer feedback or changes to the software or business environment.” This relentless customer focus is why we built our database monitoring tool. You can find more information and download a free demo here. Please let us know if it gets your thumbs up.

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