I’ve released version 1.1.7 of the Better Cacti Templates project. This release includes a bunch of bug fixes, some new graphs for MySQL, and two new sets of graphs, for Redis graphing and for JMX graphing.

There are upgrade instructions on the project wiki for this and all releases. There is also a comprehensive tutorial on how to create your own graphs and templates with this project. Use the project issue tracker to view and report issues, and use the project mailing list to discuss the …

I’m speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010. I hope I don’t lose my voice, because I have four sessions!

• Diagnosing and Fixing MySQL Performance Problems
• EXPLAIN Demystified
• Read-Write Splitting: Techniques, Challenges, and Solutions
• MySQL Graphing and Trending with Cacti

You can click through on the links above to learn …

I’ve released version 1.1.6 of the Better Cacti Templates project. This release includes a bunch of bug fixes (but not all of them!) and two new sets of graphs. One set is for disk I/O on GNU/Linux, and the other is a new set of templates for OpenVZ. I’m looking for feedback on both of those. This release also has a bunch of code-level features: much better test coverage (hooray!), and a refactored ss_get_by_ssh.php that makes it much easier to create new graphs and templates. The SSH-based templates also take advantage of the same caching as the MySQL templates, which makes them a lot more efficient.

There are upgrade instructions on the project wiki for this and all releases. There is also a comprehensive tutorial on …

If you’d like some improvements to the Cacti templates (MySQL, Apache, Memcached, and more) I’ve been maintaining, please make your voice heard — either write to the mailing list, or post a new issue (or comment on an existing one) on the issue list. I’ve got a bunch of work underway, including a test suite for ss_get_by_ssh.php.

Related posts:

1. Version 1.1.6 of Better Cacti Templates released I’ve
2. Version 1.1.2 of improved Cacti templates released I’ve
3. …

I’ve released version 1.1.4 of my improved Cacti templates. Unlike the prior release, which was solely bug fixes, this one includes new graphs in the MySQL template. Some of the graphs are of data that’s exposed in standard MySQL versions, but some of it is available only in Percona’s high-performance builds of the MySQL database server. If you don’t have a Percona build, those graphs will just contain nothing, but there is no detrimental effect.

This template release is fully backwards compatible with the previous release. The upgrade process is to copy the new PHP file into place and import the new template file. You can then add the new graphs to your hosts.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to address many of the other open issues. Most of these were minor, such as a debug …

I’ve just released version 1.1.3 of the Cacti templates I wrote for MySQL. This is a bug-fix release only, and affects only ss_get_mysql_stats.php. To upgrade from the previous release, upgrade ss_get_mysql_stats.php. Don’t forget to save and restore your configuration options, if any. (Note that there is a feature to help with this: you can keep configuration options in ss_get_mysql_stats.php.cnf to avoid making them in ss_get_mysql_stats.php.)

Next up: actual template changes! More graphs!

The changelog follows.

2009-10-24: version 1.1.3

        * This is a bug-fix release only, and contains no template changes.
        * To upgrade from the previous release, upgrade ss_get_mysql_stats.php.
        * MySQL 5.1 broke backwards compatibility with table_cache (issue 63).
        * Added a version number to the script (partial fix for issue …

I’ve had plenty of comments on specific products to Monitoring MySQL Options before providing the completed list. Here are the results from my survey to give everybody a more complete list.

My recent poll What alert monitoring do you use? showed 25% of the 58 respondents to bravely state they had no MySQL monitoring. I see 1 in 3, ~33% in my consulting so this is consistent.

There is no excuse to not have some MySQL Monitoring on your production system. At the worse case, you should be logging important MySQL information for later analysis. I use my own Logging and Analyzing scripts on every client for an immediate assessment regardless of what’s available. I combine that with my modified statpack to give me immediate text based analysis, broken down by hour chunks for quick reference. These help me in troubleshooting, but they are …

While going about my day, I stumbled upon John Allspaw’s tweet about his experience with MySQL 5.0.51 versus Percona’s 5.0.83 highperf Percona build. For those that don’t remember John from the MySQL Conference & Expo’s, he’s the guy managing operations at Flickr, and he recently even wrote a book about webops.

Click on the photo above, to see when the upgrade happened. Amazed?

Haven’t tested this out myself, though I’m curious to see how this stacks up against MySQL 5.4, which is also aimed at being a high performance release. In another note, it seems like the mysql-cacti-templates could use a bit more verbose …

If you are unfamiliar with what to monitor in MySQL, starting with looking at what popular Monitoring products monitor. For example, the following is the list of MySQL Cacti Plugin measurements.

Innodb Buffer Pool Activity

• Pages Created
• Pages Written
• Pages Read

Innodb Buffer Pool Pages

• Pool Size
• Database Pages
• Free Pages
• Modified Pages

Inoodb File I/O

• File Reads
• Files Writes
• Log Writes
• File Fsyncs

Innodb Pending I/O

• Aio Log Ios
• Aio Sync ios
• Buffer Pool Flushes
• Chkp Writes
• Ibuf Aio Reads
• Log Flushes
• Log Writes
• Normal Aio Reads …