Database Center is an AI-assisted dashboard that gives you one
centralized view across your entire database fleet. You can view database fleet
health issues and recommendations, and you can ask questions about database
fleet health issues, including availability configuration, data protection,
security, and industry compliance.

Database Center aggregates and summarizes your fleet's top-level health
issues based on data from your Google Cloud projects and Security Command Center and then
advises you on how to investigate affected projects or instances. The
Database Center dashboard displays the number of issues for each
health issue category. For more information about the health issues for
supported Google Cloud database products, see [Supported health
issues](https://docs.cloud.google.com/database-center/docs/database-health-issues#supported-health-issues).

Data displayed in Database Center is not updated in real time.
Data is usually updated within a few minutes, but sometimes data may take up to
24 hours to update.

Database Center supports health issues for the following
Google Cloud database products:

- AlloyDB for PostgreSQL
- Bigtable
- Cloud SQL for MySQL
- Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL
- Cloud SQL for SQL Server
- Firestore
- Memorystore for Redis
- Memorystore for Redis Cluster
- MySQL running on a Compute Engine (VM) ([Preview](https://cloud.google.com/products/#product-launch-stages))
- Oracle Database@Google Cloud
- PostgreSQL running on a Compute Engine (VM) ([Preview](https://cloud.google.com/products/#product-launch-stages))
- Spanner
- SQL Server running on a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) ([Preview](https://cloud.google.com/products/#product-launch-stages))

While Database Center supports the following database products, it doesn't monitor their health issues.

- BigQuery: Supports resource inventory monitoring.
- Memorystore for Valkey: Supports resource inventory and metrics monitoring.

[Gemini](https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/overview)
chat is available in Database Center to respond to your
questions about database fleet health, giving you customized recommendations
based on your Google Cloud projects, and helping you identify and implement
the right policies for your database fleets.

## Database Center benefits

Database Center is particularly useful if your cloud resources
are distributed across many different products and if your organization uses
many different projects. For example, database platform teams can use
Database Center to identify compliance risks and enforce best
practices, while site reliability engineers can use
Database Center to help ensure that their database resources are
protected against downtime.

Database Center also helps reduce your database governance risks.
*Database governance* is defined as the practices and tools that help you
monitor and protect access to sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, from
acquisition through use and disposal.

## Types of health issues that you can monitor

You can use Database Center to determine the following about your
database fleet's health:

- Your overall Google Cloud database footprint.
- The database engines and versions that you're using across your database fleet.
- Whether your critical databases are optimized for availability. If your databases aren't optimized, Database Center helps you identify which databases are most at risk of downtime.
- How well your critical databases are protected against disasters and data corruption, if they're regularly backed up. If your databases aren't backed up, Database Center helps you determine which databases aren't protected.
- Whether your database resources are configured to follow security best practices.
- Whether your databases are compliant with industry standards, and if not, which databases are out of compliance.

## What's next

- [Learn about database health
  issues](https://docs.cloud.google.com/database-center/docs/database-health-issues).
- [Get started with
  Database Center](https://docs.cloud.google.com/database-center/docs/set-up-database-center).