The Percona Managed Services team recently faced a somewhat peculiar client issue. We’d receive pages about their MySQL service being unreachable. However, studying the logs showed nothing out of the ordinary…. for the most part it appeared to be a normal shutdown and there was nothing in anyone’s command history nor a cron task to speak of that was suspicious.

This is one of those obscure and peculiar (read: unique) issues that triggered an old memory; I’d seen this behavior before and I had just the tool to catch the culprit in the act.

Systemtap made diagnostics of this issue possible and I can’t state enough how much of a powerful and often under-utilized tool set systemtap really is.

cat > signals.stp << EOF
probe signal.send {
if (sig_name == …