Why We’re Building Guardioz
PostgreSQL performance guidance for teams without a dedicated DBA
A PostgreSQL database slows down. Query durations change, resource use rises, or a dashboard starts showing a warning. The team has data to investigate — but where should it look first?
In many engineering teams, that question reaches a backend engineer, a DevOps specialist, a site reliability engineer, a platform engineer, or a founder. They run PostgreSQL in production, but database administration is one responsibility among many.
We started building Guardioz to help these teams move from noticing a database symptom to deciding what to investigate or do next.
The investigation can be harder than the fix.
When PostgreSQL behaves unexpectedly, finding the cause can take longer than applying the eventual fix. Root cause analysis may require engineers to correlate metrics, logs, query statistics, and configuration details across several tools and views.
Under pressure, scaling up can seem like the fastest way to relieve a symptom. Sometimes additional capacity is the right response. In other cases, it may reduce the visible impact without resolving the underlying cause — while increasing infrastructure costs.
We believe investigations should be more focused, and that teams should have a better chance of spotting issues before they turn into urgent production incidents.
PostgreSQL already provides signals. The challenge is interpreting them.
The PostgreSQL ecosystem offers a wealth of useful information. Tools such as Grafana and pgBadger, alongside PostgreSQL statistics such as those exposed through pg_stat_statements, help teams observe database behavior and investigate performance.
But signals need context.
Which finding matters for this workload? How serious is it? Is it a genuine issue or normal variation? What should the team examine first?
Answering those questions often depends on experience: knowing what healthy behavior looks like, understanding which configuration settings may be relevant, and connecting evidence from different sources. Raw data is necessary, but it does not always make the next step clear.
Not every team has a dedicated DBA.
Engineering teams can build and operate sophisticated systems without hiring a specialist for every technology. That can be a sensible choice, but it does not remove the need for database expertise.
In some organizations, that knowledge sits with one experienced engineer. In others, it comes from a consultant or internal documentation that may not keep up with a changing system. When an issue appears, the team still needs to interpret the evidence and decide what to do.
We want to make useful PostgreSQL guidance more accessible without assuming every team needs a full-time database administrator.
Small issues can add up.
Not every operational problem starts with an outage. It may be an index that is no longer useful, a configuration setting copied from an old example, or a default that no longer fits the workload.
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PostgreSQL defaults are a starting point for unknown hardware and workloads. A setting that needs adjustment is not a judgment about the engineer who configured it.
Individually, these issues may not trigger an alert. Over time, they can contribute to slower queries, avoidable infrastructure costs, or incidents that are harder to investigate.
Prevention does not mean predicting every failure. It means making relevant signals easier to recognize while there is still time to investigate them calmly.
What Guardioz does today.
Guardioz turns PostgreSQL’s own signals into clear, prioritized findings, each with an explanation and a safe next step. Today, its checks cover server settings, indexes, autovacuum, and write-ahead log (WAL) archiving.
The aim is to answer three questions: what is wrong, how serious is it, and what should the team investigate or change first?
Recommendations show the measured data from your own server that they rely on and state whether a change requires a restart. Where available, they include SQL to review and run. Other findings call for a diagnostic check rather than a command.
Guardioz monitors your server around the clock, on a schedule. The agent collects a snapshot roughly once an hour.
It runs on the database server, connects to PostgreSQL locally, and executes a fixed set of queries in read-only sessions. It initiates the outbound connection to Guardioz over HTTPS, so you do not need to open an inbound port or expose the database port to the internet.
You review the evidence. You decide what to change.
Each finding includes a rationale that engineers can review. The intention is to provide evidence and recommendations that teams can evaluate, not a conclusion they must accept without an explanation.
Guardioz does not apply changes automatically. You decide whether and when to run a command.
Today, Guardioz supports PostgreSQL 18 on self-managed servers, with the agent installed on the primary, not a standby replica. Query analysis is planned; it is not a capability available today.
From monitoring to decisions.
Monitoring remains essential. Guardioz is not intended to replace monitoring tools or the engineers responsible for production systems. It helps teams interpret PostgreSQL signals, prioritize what matters, and decide what to investigate or change next.
We want engineers to spend less time bringing evidence together from different places and more time making informed decisions — then getting back to building.
Help decide what we build next.
Guardioz is in beta. You can sign up, and the product is early — we say so up front. Always free for one user. No credit card required.
Customers have a real say in what we build next, during the beta and after it: which problems matter most, which recommendations are useful, and where the explanations need to be clearer.
Learn more and sign up at https://guardioz.com.
The Guardioz Team
