Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Please consider monitoring your productive ArangoDB installation as part of the best practices strategy. It is effortlessly done using established services Prometheus for data collection and Grafana for visualisation and alerting.

Introduction

“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka’s talents wouldn’t have been wasted as DBA. Well, reasonable people might disagree.

With this article, we are shouting out a new enterprise feature for ArangoDB: consistent online single server or cluster-wide “hot backups.”

If you do not care for an abstract definition and would rather directly see a working example, simply scroll down to Section “A full cycle” below.

Snapshots of arbitrary sized complex raw datasets, be it file systems, databases, etc.: they are extremely useful for ultra-fast..

“I must have a prodigious amount of mind;it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!”― Mark Twain

How many shards should one choose, when creating collections in ArangoDB clusters?

TLDR: Don’t be too shy with sharding your data in many shards across your cluster. Be mindful however that AQL-heavy applications might not profit as much from heavy distribution.

How a database works and performs in a single instance setup is becoming more and more irrelevant lately, if said database cannot scale. Distributed, clustered databases are, as far as one can tell right now, the future.

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Cluster Administration course will take you all the way from concept and anatomy of the ArangoDB cluster to maintenance, resilience and troubleshooting of your distributed environment.

– law of the polish-lithuanian common-wealth, 1505

A warning aforehand: this is a rather longish post, but hang in there it might be saving you a lot of time one day.