After some recent work with systemd I’ve realized it’s power and I can come clean that I am a fan. I realize that there are multitudes of posts out there with arguments both for and against systemd but let’s look at some nice ways to have systemd provide us with (but not limited to) pt-kill-as-a-service.

This brief post introduces you to a systemd unit file and how we can leverage them to enable pt-kill at startup, have it start after mysqld and ensure that MySQL is running by using the mysql service as a dependency of pt-kill. By using systemd to handle this we don’t have to complicate matters by ‘monitoring the monitor’ using hacky shell scripts, cron or utilities like monit.

So then, a quick primer on systemd, because lets face it, we’ve all been avoiding it. Systemd is not new but it made recent headlines in …