For getting early warnings and helping your employees debug what went wrong there are several good monitoring tools. They wont magically solve your problems but

For getting early warnings and helping your employees debug what went wrong there are several good monitoring tools. They wont magically solve your problems but it will make it much easier for non-database experts to run a database server. For monitoring PostgreSQL I have used the excellent plugins that are shipped with munin. http://munin-monitoring.org/ http://munin-monitoring.org/ EDIT: munin does also ship monitoring plugins for MySQL but since I have never used them I cannot vouch for them. The general health monitoring (disk usage, CPU usage, SMART status, inode usage, ...) of the machines provided by munin is also probably more valuable than the database specific monitoring.