Sharding administration and monitoring

Sharded MongoDB environments have some unique challenges and limitations compared to single-server or replica set deployments. In this section, we will explore how MongoDB balances our data across shards using chunks and how we can tweak it if we need. Together, we will explore some of the shard's design limitations.

Balancing data – how to track and keep our data balanced

One of the advantages of sharding in MongoDB is that it is mostly transparent to the application and requires minimal administration and operational effort.

One of the core tasks that MongoDB needs to perform continuously is balancing data between shards. No matter whether we implement range- or hash-based sharding, MongoDB will need to calculate bounds for the hashed field to be able to figure out on which shard to direct every new document insert or update. As our data grows, these bounds may need to get readjusted to avoid having a hot shard that ends up with a majority of our data...