MongoDB is a great choice for any application that needs to store and retrieve large amounts of data, Once you've decided that MongoDB is the right database for your application, following are some operational best practices that you should follow to make it even more effective:
Enable authentication and Authorization
Security is a critical aspect of any database system. Part of this security is authentication and authorization.
- Authentication is the process of proving a user's identity, which can be configured in mongod.conf file
- Authorization is the process of determining if a user has access to a certain resource which can be implemented at the database level by creating users and roles.
Configure High Availability
High availability is a must for any database. If you don't have high availability in your database, it will not be able to handle the load of all of your users. Since MongoDB is a distributed database, you can't just configure one server and expect it to handle all of your users. Instead, you need to create multiple replicas so that if one server fails or gets overloaded, another server will pick up where it left off. This also means that each replica member must have an independent IP address from all other replicas so that they are not colluding with each other over time.
Don’t use a single node cluster for production rather set up use Replica sets that offer high availability.
Implement log rotation mechanism
Logs are a critical part of MongoDB, and they need to be rotated regularly. This is especially true when you have a high volume of read/writes.
The default MongoDB log rotation strategy is simply to rotate older logs and compress them. There are other approaches for configuring your log rotation strategy, including using a journal or rotating the logs based on their age or size.
To rotate the log files, you must perform one of these steps:
- Send a SIGUSR1 signal to the mongod or mongos process.
- Run the MongoDB logRotate command.
- Run the Linux/Unix logrotate utility.
Monitoring
MongoDB monitoring performance is the process of tracking down any problems with your MongoDB application as they happen so that you can prevent them from occurring again. There are several different methods for monitoring performance, you can use the following utilities:
- mongostat: to monitor the current workload of the database server, grouped by query types.
- mongotop: shows the database server activity grouped by collections.
There are many 3rd party solutions that provide a dashboard.
Backup and recovery mechanism
One of the most important tasks for any database administrator is to ensure that their databases can be recovered quickly in the event of a disaster. It is not enough to just have a backup system set up—you need to have a process in place for regularly backing up your data. you can use the following simple process to do so:
- Run mongodump –db -o backupfile.dump_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.json
- Send the file via FTP to the centralized place.
- The mongorestore command restores your database, run mongorestore -f backupfile.dump_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.json
To implement operation best practices like log rotation, real-time monitoring, and in-house backup solutions let's talk and discuss the different strategies for schema modeling for your use case.
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