Solution Overview — For Management
Two costs dominate the “the database is slow” class of incident: the user-facing impact while the incident is open, and the time the most senior engineers spend trying to find the cause. Both are worse when the available tools only show symptoms.
Oninit® DBVoyeur turns those investigations from days into minutes by giving the team a clear, timestamped record of every conversation between application and database — without changing the application, the database, or how anything is configured.
The business case
| Outcome | How DBVoyeur delivers it |
|---|---|
| Faster incident resolution | Engineers see the exact slow query, the exact session, the exact response time — in order, with precise timing. Less guessing, fewer escalations, shorter outages. |
| No production risk | DBVoyeur is read-only by design. It does not modify any traffic, does not change the database, and does not require any application change. It can only observe. |
| Low total overhead | 1–2% of one CPU core in the typical install. Effectively zero on the database host in the separate-host install. Materially less than database-level tracing. |
| Use it once, keep it forever | Once installed, the same tool serves the next slow query, the next mysterious disconnect, the next vendor finger-pointing exercise. No per-incident licensing. |
| One tool, every database | Informix, Db2, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SAP ASE, SAP IQ, OneDB. One operational grammar across the estate. |
What it removes from the risk register
- “We can’t tell whether the slowness is the database, the network, or the application.”
- “Our investigations take days because we don’t have visibility at this layer.”
- “Adding tracing to production is too risky.”
- “We’re paying for senior consulting time on problems we should be able to triage in-house.”
One concrete number
The deployment artefact is small. A typical first install — from receiving the distribution to capturing a real conversation against a real database — runs to under an hour, on a single host, by a single operator. Multi-database estates scale linearly from that baseline.
Why Oninit
Oninit has supported the global Informix community for two decades as “the Down System Specialists.” DBVoyeur is delivered and supported by the same team that gets called when other people’s database systems are down — the engineers who already do this kind of investigation for a living, productised so the customer’s team can do it themselves.
Time to value
| Step | Typical effort |
|---|---|
| Receive distribution, install on a host | Under an hour for a single database. |
| First operator-driven incident triage | Hours. |
| Standing observability across the estate | Days to weeks. |
| Sustainable ROI | Typically inside the first quarter of use, measured against avoided senior-engineer time and avoided incident duration. |
Next step
A short scoping call to understand the environment and the kinds of incident DBVoyeur would shorten. A working trial against a non-production instance can be running the same week.
Call +1 913 732 8892 (US) or +44 20 8133 7529 (UK), or email support.info@oninit.com.