Over the last decade or so, modern fintech has revolutionised the way money and information change hands. This push towards digitising nearly all paper transactions has generated an enormous amount of data that entities such as financial institutions, merchants, governments, and insurance companies must store, secure, and make easily accessible to customers throughout the world.

The deluge of data is only expected to grow as fintech companies begin to harness Internet of Things (IoT) to create better customer services and insights. IDC estimates that by 2025, IoT devices alone will generate 73.1 zettabytes (ZB) of data.

Underlying all this data and billions of daily transactions are databases. Databases provide the foundation that supports fast, convenient, always-on services that fintech customers demand. As their products and services expand, many fintech companies are turning to open source databases due to their many advantages: high-quality, community-driven innovation; liberal licensing; and portability so companies can deploy anywhere, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model.

They can also customise and extend the code, which improves security because any user of the software can run their own source-code scanner on it.

With so many fintech companies having adopted open source databases, the question is, how do they effectively monitor and manage their database estates in the face of increasing complexity? The answer is Percona Monitoring and Management.

Percona Monitoring and Management – unified monitoring and management for fintech  

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is an open source database observability, monitoring, and management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. It takes the complexity out of database operations, making performance optimisation easier and database troubleshooting faster.

PMM provides fintech companies with a unified view of the health of their entire database environment, allowing them to optimize performance and availability, harden security, meet strict data privacy and PCI regulations, and deliver products and services to market quickly.

Single pane of glass view of database environments

Through PMM’s single pane of glass, fintech companies get a deep understanding of their various database platforms and infrastructures.

They can monitor databases and database clusters wherever they’re deployed: in private and public clouds or on-premises. And they can customise dashboards and set up real-time alerts to the channels of their choice, such as Slack and Microsoft teams.

Out of the box security, compliance, and performance features

PMM includes built-in “Advisors,” which offer automated checks of things like security vulnerabilities, policy compliance, performance problems, and data corruption.

It ensures that database platforms are highly available and performing at their best, automatically checking for potential threats like replication inconsistencies and unstable OS configurations, and searching for performance improvements that help fintech companies tune their environments.

Deep insight for discovering “unknown unknowns”

In addition to sophisticated monitoring and alerting capabilities, PMM offers advanced observability features. Monitoring allows companies to watch and understand the state of their systems based on predefined sets of metrics or logs. This is important, but only shows that something is not working, not why it’s not working.

Observability, on the other hand, offers deep visibility into the internal states of database systems. With this insight, fintech companies can proactively discover and debug the “unknown, unknowns,” exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance.

Agile, scalable deployment capabilities for a competitive edge

Percona acts as a partner to fintech companies to help them deploy code faster, increase agility, and scale deployments rapidly. Percona collaborates with these companies to build scalable, secure, automated database deployment pipelines so that anyone can spin up infrastructure on demand, from developers who need to deliver applications fast to sales teams who need to showcase products quickly.

Cost efficiencies of open source

Partnering with Percona allows fintech companies to realise secure, compliant, high-performing database estates and greater cost efficiencies.

Percona builds enterprise features, available for free, on top of the community versions of open source database software. It combines its solutions with database experts who offer deep knowledge of all types of databases so fintech companies get the most from their environments, while reducing costs and rapidly delivering new products to market.

To learn more about PMM, visit the Percona website.

By Donnie Berholz, SVP Product Management, Percona

Donnie Berkholz PhD is a member of the Executive Management Team at Percona.

His background includes leadership, advisory, and engineering roles at organisations including Docker, Scale Venture Partners, travel-tech leader CWT, 451 Research, RedMonk, and Gentoo Linux.