GUI monitoring tools for MySQL are not always suitable for all our needs or situations. Most of them are designed to provide historical views into what happens to our database over time rather then real-time insight into current MySQL server status. Excellent free tools for this include Cacti, Zabbix, Ganglia, Nagios, etc. But each of them needs to be properly configured to provide details on what is going on in our MySQL instances. And setting up one of these monitoring solutions is neither quick nor trivial (well, maybe with the exception of Ganglia).

MySQL Workbench provides …

Here are 3 recent ' oops... wish I hadn't done that :/ ' mistakes I've made since joining moz that you might as well avoid (I'm sure there will be more, but they better not be the same)

Reviewing config files for MySQL, but not all of the defaults 

    We recently migrated a few MySQL databases to a new datacenter, and took advantage of the migration to upgrade the MySQL version(s) at the

Today, just like many times before, I needed to configure a monitoring server for MySQL using Cacti and awesome Percona Monitoring Templates. The only difference was that this time I wanted to get it to run with 1 min resolution (using ganglia and graphite, both with 10 sec resolution, for all the rest of our monitoring in Swiftype really spoiled me!). And that’s where the usual pain in the ass Cacti configuration gets really amplified by the million things you need to change to make it work. So, this is a short checklist post for those who need to configure a Cacti server with 1 minute resolution and setup Percona Monitoring Plugins on it.

Configuring Cacti for 60-seconds polling

First of all, we need to take a Cacti server, which by default is configured to do polling …

Many application developers would know of New Relic. A SaaS performance and monitoring tool targeted towards your web application monitoring including PHP, Ruby, Java, .Net, Python and Node.

With the release today (June 19, 2013) of the New Relic Platform, custom monitoring of data stores including MySQL are now possible. Try it now free. This link will provide you a free standard account (no cost, no billing details necessary), that enables you to perform application monitoring, server monitoring, MySQL instance monitoring and monitoring of many other products via many plugins.

Over the next few posts I will be discussing some of the design decisions I made for this MySQL plugin. New Relic has certain …

We have had some success with the introduction of Glimpsee last month. Merci !
I would like to thanks all of you who have registered and those who are interested in Glimpsee without even really knowing what’s going on.
It is really important for us to feel enthusiasm about our work, because we work hard to provide a tool that could improve your life.

We hope to offer a public beta release of Glimpsee before the end of the year and many more surprises before. Meanwhile, we would like to offer you an incomplete FAQ about Glimpsee, enjoy :
 

What is Glimpsee?

Glimpsee is a smart dashboard for lazy DBA (devops included) The dashboard provides, as Software-as-a-Service, a new way to view the status …

When you setup a monitoring system for SQL Server, you often use thresholds to determine when an instance is healthy. You might say that you want to be alerted when CPU use is over 90% or when there’s only 10% of disk space left. The trouble with these thresholds is that they will often throw off false positives, or send you an alert when really nothing is wrong. Simple thresholds often have to be tuned to the individual instance, since a server with 10 TB still has 1 TB of space left at 90% disk use.

Baron Schwartz blogged about this issue in an article and he’s been creating software that monitors MySQL beyond simple thresholds, after stating that they do not work in most cases. He makes a good …

I was a guest on the Food Fight Show last week, along with a bevy of really smart people asking and answering tough questions on fault detection. We didn’t talk a lot about MySQL, but given that VividCortex is focusing on MySQL initially, pretty much all of my experience with zero-threshold, zero-configuration fault detection is MySQL-based.

It’s a fun conversation with a lot of insights into the industry, what’s wrong with current monitoring tools, and where monitoring is going. Also, it’s sold out now, but Monitorama is a conference you might be interested in if you’re doing monitoring (and who isn’t?)

Suddenly your application starts throwing "error 157" and performance degrades or is non-existing. It is easy to panic then and try all sorts of actions to get past the problem. We have seen several users doing:

• rolling restart
• stop cluster / start cluster

because they also see this in the error logs:

120828 13:15:11 [Warning] NDB: Could not acquire global schema lock (4009)Cluster Failure

That is not a really a nice error message. To begin with, it is a WARNING when something is obviously wrong. IMHO, it should be CRITICAL. Secondly, the message ‘Cluster Failure’ is misleading.  The cluster may not really have failed, so there is no point trying to restart it before we know more.

So what does error 157 mean and what can we do about it?

By using perror we can get a hint what it means:

$ …

New quick-start guide for MySQL DBAs: SkySQL™ Enterprise Monitor makes managing your MySQL & MariaDB databases that much easier

We’ve just published a new Quick Start Guide to SkySQL™ Enterprise Monitor for all MySQL & MariaDB DBAs out there, who are looking for ways to manage their databases more easily.

read more

Devopsdays Mountainview sold out in a short 3 hours .. but there's other events that will breath devops this summer.
DrupalCon in Munich will be one of them ..

Some of you might have noticed that I`m cochairing the devops track for DrupalCon Munich,
The CFP is open till the 11th of this month and we are still actively looking for speakers.

We're trying to bridge the gap between drupal developers and the people that put their code to production, at scale.
But also enhancing the knowledge of infrastructure components Drupal developers depend on.

We're looking for talks both on culture (both success stories and failure) , automation,
specifically looking for people talking about drupal deployments , eg using tools like Capistrano, Chef, Puppet,
We want to hear where Continuous Integration fits in your deployment , do you do Continuous Delivery of a drupal environment.
And how do you …