This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice monitoring and alerting. (You can download my slides and view the recorded webinar here.)
Monitor the things
One of the aides to keeping the system up and …