Aurva Database Activity Monitoring vs DSGuard

Aurva Database Activity Monitoring is a paid, self-hosted product for monitoring database queries from people, service accounts, and AI agents. It identifies the responsible actor and shows role, application, and access path. For AI agents, it builds behavioral baselines and alerts when activity deviates from expected patterns. Policies can govern access by identity, data sensitivity, location, and time, including blocking access or redacting columns. Aurva describes a passive, out-of-band architecture that monitors traffic without sitting in the query path and says it adds 0 ms of application latency. Deployment options include agent, agentless, combined, cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups. Named coverage includes PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery, DynamoDB, Kafka, and other stores, with integrations including Databricks, Amazon Athena, Aurora, Redis, and Microsoft SQL Server. Aurva lists audit logging and sensitive-data monitoring aligned with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 objectives. Pricing is custom and available on request.

DSGuard is a self-hosted gateway that controls and audits database access between applications and databases. It applies identity-aware access rules, policies and dynamic masking, and lists PostgreSQL, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB through the MySQL-compatible wire protocol, MongoDB and ClickHouse. Controls include TOTP MFA, IP restrictions, role- and object-level permissions, SQL injection protection, dangerous-function blocking and rate limits. Data safeguards include full, partial and hash masking, column-level controls, response leak detection, result limits and query-result truncation. Query logs record identities, decisions and block reasons; Database Activity Monitoring adds native database audit, including activity that bypasses the gateway. Integrations include Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards and centralized logs for a SIEM. The site describes deployment on premises, in private or public cloud, or in hybrid environments, and lists AWS, Azure and GCP compatibility. The free Community edition is self-managed and has no support entitlement; Professional and Enterprise plans have annual terms, with prices not listed.