Updated 1/11/2017

Quite some time ago, when we added the ability to monitor MySQL query performance statistics from MySQL’s PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, we learned a number of valuable lessons, still worth sharing. There are definitely right and wrong ways to do it. If you are looking to the P_S tables for monitoring MySQL query performance, this blog post might save you some time and mistakes.

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What Is The Performance Schema?

First, a quick introduction. The Performance Schema includes a set of tables that give information on how statements are performing. Most of the P_S tables follow a set of predictable conventions: there’s a set of tables with a limited set of full-granularity current and/or historical data, which is aggregated into tables that accumulate over time. In the case …

MySQL continues to be one of the most popular databases used in cloud-native applications. In fact, MySQL is so popular that other cloud databases such as AWS Aurora maintain wire protocol compatibility with MySQL. For SREs and DevOps engineers running MySQL database in production, it is crucial to understand how to monitor MySQL. MySQL poor health can lead to cascading effects on other application components. For example, slow queries can impact page load times for an application, or missing indexes can result in high-latency and application time-outs. By effectively monitoring the performance of databases and query executions, SREs and DevOps can identify if there are bottlenecks in the database tier which affect the overall application performance. With this appreciation for the importance of MySQL monitoring, let us quickly survey what techniques are commonly used for MySQL monitoring and then discuss …

This blog post discusses an information script for the Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) tool.

In recent news, we announced the fresh-of-the-press Percona Monitoring and Management (or PMM for short) platform. Given the interaction of the different components that together make up PMM, I developed a script that helps provide you information about the status of your PMM installation.

You can use this script yourself, or one of our support might point you to this page to obtain the information they need to troubleshoot an issue you are experiencing.

You will likely want to execute this script once on the PMM …

Recently, I worked on a customer case where the customer needed to monitor the checksum via Nagios monitoring. The pmp-check-pt-table-checksum plugin from Percona Monitoring Plugins for MySQL achieves this goal. I thought it was worth a blogpost.

pmp-check-pt-table-checksum

 alerts you when the pt-table-checksum tool from Percona Toolkit finds data drifts on …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.0.2 Beta on 28 July 2016.

Like prior versions, PMM is distributed through Docker Hub and is free to download. Full instructions for download and installation of the server and client are available in the documentation.

Notable changes to the tool include:

• Upgraded to Grafana 3.1.0.
• Upgraded to Prometheus 1.0.1.
• Set default metrics retention to 30 days.
• Eliminated port 9001. Now the container uses only one configurable port, 80 by default.
• Eliminated the need to specify ADDRESS variable …

Since we announced our support for Amazon Web Service's Aurora last year, we've had great experiences working with customers who use Aurora as their database system of choice. And not only is Amazon's RDS excellent, so is their team and support.

Recently, we encountered a MySQL bug that was, in turn, having effects on Amazon’s RDS. The MySQL issue involved a problematic query that caused Aurora instances to crash under load; upon discovering this issue, we had the opportunity to work with AWS to identify the error in MySQL and fix it, so that it would avoid an impact on AWS’s systems. It turned out that the query itself posed a potential problem for all monitoring services -- not just VividCortex; fortunately, however, once AWS addresses the bug, the problem will be fixed for all monitoring products that might come across it, …

In an industry as fast-growing and interconnected as database technology’s, it’s exciting to track how innovations in one platform can ignite beneficial, rippling effects on other, surrounding systems. At VividCortex we frequently find ourselves faced with opportunities to improve our monitoring solutions based on how database technologies (such as MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc) develop and integrate new upgrades.

When those platforms that we monitor -- already powerful, tried and true -- equip themselves with new features, we work to discover how VividCortex can leverage those features and make our own technology even better. In the case of MySQL 5.7.8’s recent introduction of Generated Virtual Columns, we found the opportunity to use a new feature to make our queries simpler and more elegant, with results …

In my last I was looking for a way to do performance monitoring and I stumbled upon Prometheus. Prometheus is much more than monitoring a single node service. Anyway let’s get the idea of gathering metrics using MySQL as example.

This how a simple configuration of Prometheus could look like:

global: 
  scrape_interval: 1m
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  evaluation_interval: 1m

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: mysql
    scheme: http
    target_groups:
    - targets: 
        - '10.17.148.31:9104'
      labels:
        zone: mysql

Every minute Prometheus accesses 172.17.148.31:9104/metrics (/metrics is a Prometheus convention) and labels the result with zone=mysql. Querying the data you can use the labels.

This is a simple configuration. The fun of Prometheus is to have a lot of targets/jobs.

Let’s have a look at our specific endpoint: …

Sylvia Botros, Sendgrid’s lead DBA, recently told us about one of the ways her teams have found unique value in VividCortex. “Engineering managers and individual developers have pinged me and said, ‘Hey, I saw this in VividCortex -- what do you think?’ Some of our developers are not fully familiar with the generals of MySQL,” she explained, “but VividCortex is giving them a view into how their app is dealing with databases. And at the same time it’s teaching them DB lingo, which is good.”  

This feedback from Sylvia opens the door to one of the questions we hear a lot about VividCortex: “How is your solution different from my existing APM (Application Performance Management) tool?”It’s a great question with many technical answers, but ultimately the only answers that matter are the ones focused on results. As an engineering-led company, we’re …

I've tried out Idera's MySQL Query Explorer, a free tool and I found it easy to use and simple to setup. The only improvement that can be suggested is to add, on the technical requirements page, that your MySQL instance (MySQL Server version 5.5 and newer) must be running with the performance_schema turned on. Otherwise the tool will just display an empty grid. After you've successfully set