When a business-critical application slows down, the heat goes up on the team supporting that application. That team typically includes application owners, virtualization administrators, storage administrators, network administrators and database administrators. In many cases, the team points their collective finger at the database. The database administrator (DBA) has to quickly determine whether the problem is a database issue. If the database is innocent, the DBA has to convince the team of that innocence. If the database is guilty, the DBA has to quickly identify the problem source, resolve it and demonstrate to the team that the issue is resolved. That’s a pretty tall order, considering the enormous complexity of today’s composite, multi-tier applications.