Firetiger Database Agents make your database better, faster, and stronger

Today, we’re excited to announce Firetiger Database Agents (DBAs). DBAs are your always-on, expert database administrators. They connect to your database and application telemetry to proactively spot issues and performance wins, then escalate and even apply fixes before your customers notice.

You can use DBAs today on Firetiger, with plans starting at $0.

What if you neither had to understand nor worry about your database?

The software gurus of Wall Street have spoken: the SaaSpocalypse is here. Nobody is safe. A mountain of applications will be broken down to their essential form: artificially intelligent lobsters, and some databases.

These are strange times. But at least one thing will remain comfortingly familiar, a question the computer folks have been asking since the 1960s: Is the database… healthy?

It’s an important question. As any seasoned database administrator will tell you: Deep down, your business is in the hands of the Postgres query planner, liable to tip over your whole website because a null_frac sample statistic was wrong. Scary, I know.

So the database is here to stay, and mission critical - surely most software teams pay it well-deserved attention, right?

We all know how this goes: the app is working, so the database is probably in decent shape? Our ORM sets up most of the stuff in there. Last quarter, Margaret went on a VPC safari to actually connect to the thing, and review most of our table indices. Seems fine.

Dear friends, there is a better way. Firetiger Agents can already monitor and operate your software and deployments 24/7. Now they can administer your databases. Enter Firetiger DBAs (Database Agents)

Firetiger DBAs follow a simple loop: Observe → Triage → Act. They observe what’s happening inside your database and around it (logs, metrics, traces, infrastructure), triage by correlating symptoms to root cause and impact, and then act, with the level of automation you choose, for example:

• Open a ticket with evidence, impact, and a recommended fix
• Create a pull request (database migration, index change, config tweak, etc)
• Execute safe, bounded SQL maintenance (e.g., VACUUM) within your guardrails

Over the past few months of testing, Firetiger DBAs have caught and acted upon thousands of production issues, saving 12 years of query execution time that would have otherwise gone down the drain (and/or lined your cloud provider’s pocket). It’s really a great feeling when an agent fixes something before a human notices.

Problems it will catch before you get paged include…

1. Missing primary keys & unindexed foreign keys 
2. Redundant, duplicate & unused indexes: indexes never read but constantly written to waste IO, storage, and write-path latency
3. Sequence / auto-increment exhaustion: ID columns silently approaching their type maximum, causing hard insert failures with no warning
4. Replication lag & connection exhaustion: replica apply delays degrade read consistency and failover safety, while idle-in-transaction pileups creep toward connection limits
5. Query regressions & expensive statements: detects top queries by total execution time, flags mean latency spikes, and catches single queries consuming a disproportionate share of total database time
6. Scan-heavy & spill-prone query patterns: surfaces queries with high rows-examined-to-rows-sent ratios, missing index usage, excessive temp-table-to-disk spill, and sort merge passes
7. Dead tuple bloat & part fragmentation: vacuum or merge processes falling behind, letting dead rows or tiny data fragments pile up and degrade read/write performance
8. Disk, memory & cache pressure: buffer/cache hit ratio drops, disk volumes approaching full, and memory tracking against available OS headroom

The Case of the Missing Index

We’ve found the Firetiger DBA very useful already at Firetiger. We’re a small team building a pretty sophisticated software product that, importantly, depends on a Postgres database. At our stage, there’s more important work than people. This used to mean that Postgres did not always get the time and attention it deserved - until we could have a highly competent database agent watching it 24/7.

To share one recent delightful experience: While the humans were busy shipping, Firetiger DBA found that our Agent Sessions table - fundamental to many parts of our product - was missing an index on a foreign key to its parent resource, Agents. Every time a user would load a page showing an Agent’s session history (there are many of these) the database was doing a full table scan over a massive number of rows. 

Normally, this type of issue would slowly get worse over time, until the point where customers would notice. Instead, the Firetiger DBA provided a proactive, timely escalation:

And even a Pull Request to add the appropriate index for this and other tables sharing the same parent-child access pattern

We reviewed, merged, and carried on shipping. We immediately saw moderate improvement in API latency, all without directly investing human effort in improving DB or application performance. What a time to be alive!

Get Yourself a Firetiger DBA

Here’s how you can set this up yourself

Sign Up for Firetiger

Our free tier is plenty to get going 

https://ui.cloud.firetiger.com/sign-up 

Connect Your Database to Firetiger

 https://ui.cloud.firetiger.com/integrations/connections/new

Firetiger Will Recommend Database Agents

Once connected, you’ll see recommended DBAs on the Agents page https://ui.firetiger-for-firetiger.firetigerapi.com/agents 

Finalize Your Database Agent

DBAs come out-of-the-box ready to administrate common database issues and opportunities.

If you want, you can tailor its workflow to your particular data, usage patterns, database configuration, permissions, etc. Just chat with it!

The Database Gets Administrated

Once enabled, Firetiger Database Agents will provide you with regular, proactive updates when your database is healthy

And when it’s not

A DBA That Knows About More Than Just Databases

When things go sideways, you can discuss and triage issues with the Database Agent. It can leverage any other data Connection you’ve created in Firetiger, for example logs/metrics/traces:

To eventually reveal that your ORM is to blame. 

What’s Next

We’ve shipped Firetiger DBAs for Postgres, MySQL, and Clickhouse, with more coming soon. You can test drive Firetiger DBAs today, for free: sign up here!

Database Agents are just the start. Our own experience has shown that Firetiger Agents are quite good at managing a wide variety of software operations and use cases - most software teams might find them familiar. Stay tuned!