In my previous blog post, ProcFS UDF: A Different Approach to Agentless Operating System Observability in Your Database, I wrote about the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin, which allows you to get operating systems stats, through the MySQL database, without having shell access to the server and any local agent installation.

Some of you wondered whether there is a way to use this goodness in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), and this blog post will show you exactly how to do that.

Unfortunately, at this point, Percona Monitoring and Management does not support the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin out of the box. It is in the backlog, along with many other cool things. However, …

In this blog, I will demonstrate how to use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to find out the reason why the MySQL server is stalling. I will use only one typical situation for the MySQL server stall in this example, but the same dashboards, graphs, and principles will help you in all other cases.

Nobody wants it but database servers may stop handling connections at some point. As a result, the application will slow down and then will stop responding.

It is always better to know about the stall from a monitoring instrument rather than from your own customers.

PMM is a great help in this case. If you look at its graphs and notice that many of them started showing unusual behavior, you need to react. In the case of stalls, you will see that either some activity went to 0 or, otherwise, it increased to high …

In the previous posts of this series, I presented how the Percona Support team approaches the analysis and troubleshooting of a MySQL server using a tried-and-tested method supported by specific tools found in the Percona Toolkit:

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 1: The Percona Support Way

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 2: Knowing the Server

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 3: What MySQL?

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 4: An Engine in …

Some of you may use MySQL’s asynchronous replication feature called Semisynchronous Replication (aka semi-sync), and now with the MySQL Semi-Sync Summary Dashboard + Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), you can see the most important metrics! Refer to the Install & Usage steps for deployment details (note you need Replication Set defined!).

What is Semisynchronous Replication

When enabled, Semisynchronous Replication instructs the Primary to wait until at least one replica has received and logged the event to the replica’s local relay log before completing the COMMIT on a transaction. This provides a higher level of data integrity because now it is known that the data exists in two places. This feature ensures a …

Optimizing MySQL performance and troubleshooting MySQL problems are two of the most critical and challenging tasks for MySQL DBAs. The databases powering applications need to be able to handle changing traffic workloads while remaining responsive and stable in order to deliver an excellent user experience. Further, DBAs are also expected to find cost-efficient means of solving these issues.

In this webinar, we will demonstrate the advanced options of Percona Monitoring and Management V.2 that enable you to solve these challenges, which are built on free and open-source software. We will look at specific, common MySQL problems and review them.

Please join Peter Zaitsev on Wednesday, April 14th, 2021, at 11 am EDT for his webinar Optimize and Troubleshoot MySQL using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

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MySQL Shell is the advanced MySQL client, which has many excellent features. In this blog, I am going to explain the MySQL shell commands “\show” and “\watch”. Both commands are very useful to monitor the MySQL process. It provides more insights into the foreground and background threads as well. 

Overview

“\show” and “\watch” are the MySQL shell commands, which can be executed using the Javascript (JS), Python (Py), and SQL interfaces. Both commands are providing the same information, but the difference is you can refresh the results when using the command “\watch”. The refresh interval is two seconds. 

• \show: Run the specified report using the provided options and arguments.
• \watch: Run the specified report using the provided options and arguments, and refresh the results at regular intervals.

Below are the available options you can use with the “\show” …

Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) for MySQL databases is an important feature that is essential and covers common use cases, like a recovery to the latest possible transaction or roll-back the database to a specific date before some bad query was executed. Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) added support for PITR in version 1.7, and in this blog post we are going to look into the technical details and decisions we made to implement this feature.

Architecture Decisions Store Binary Logs on Object Storage

MySQL uses …

Hi and thanks to all who attended my webinar on Tuesday, January 26th titled Using PMM to Identify & Troubleshoot Problematic MySQL Queries!

Like we do after all our webinars, we compile the list of questions that were answered verbally and also those that were posed yet remained unanswered since we ran out of time during the broadcast.  Before we get to the questions, I wanted to make sure to include a link to the RED Method for MySQL Queries by Peter Zaitsev, Percona’s CEO:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/12470

Hi Michael, you suggested that table create and update times should be ignored. Surely these values come from information_schema.tables? Does that not reflect what I would see …

Join us as Michael Coburn, Percona Product Manager, discusses two methods to identify and troubleshoot problematic MySQL queries using the RED Method and Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Query Analytics. He will also highlight specific Dashboards in PMM that visualize the rate, errors, and duration of MySQL events that may be impacting the stability and performance of your database instance.

Please join Michael Coburn, Product Manager, Percona, on Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 at 2:30 pm for his webinar “Using Percona Monitoring and Management to Identify and Troubleshoot Problematic MySQL Queries”.

Watch Recorded Webinar

If you can’t attend, …

At work, I am in an ongoing discussion with a number of people on the Observability of Outliers. It started with the age-old question “How do I find slow queries in my application?” aka “What would I want from tooling to get that data and where should that tooling sit?”

As a developer, I just want to automatically identify and isolate slow queries!

Where I work, we do have SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor aka Vividcortex to find slow queries, so that helps. But that collects data at the database, which means you get to see slow queries, but maybe not application context.

There is also work done by a few developers which instead collects query strings, query execution times and query counts at the application. This has access to the call stack, so it can tell you which code generated the query that was slow.

It …