More importantly, how often to you confirm access to your server and database with that alert monitoring?

With a client yesterday the primary database server while still usable and serving connections for a while, but was not accessible via SSH to investigate performance issues. It eventually became non responsive and required a physical reboot. With alert monitoring for system availability only recorded every 5 minutes this was simply too long a delay.

This lead to a discussion with more questions then answers including.

• How often should you ping your server(s), both internally and externally?
• How often do you connect physically to your server for confirmation, e.g. a ssh keyed authentication test?
• How often do you perform a physical database connection test?
• How often do you do an end to end test, including http request to database query test?

As with all of …

Why a New Utility?

A couple of months back, Tim Procter, Sheeri Cabral and I were discussing about how best to diagnose a MySQL server and/or tune its performance, automating the process as much as possible. The Performance Advisors from MySQL Enterprise do this, but most of our customers don’t have a subscription and Pythian’s collective experience is not necessary reflected by its rules.

In our daily work, we have used Major Heyden’s MySQL Tuner, Mark Leith’s Statpack and our own tools to review a MySQL server configuration parameters. However, all of these tools had limitations in regards of what we wanted to achieve. Our major …

I am publishing my MySQL related bookmark collection http://www.mysqlpreacher.com/bookmarks/.

Feel free to send me links you think might be good to add in order to help others.

Remember, SHARING IS CARING!!! …. we get so much for free, why shouldn’t we give some back?

Cheers,
Darren

I was actually exploring inotify-tools for something else, but they can also be handy for seeing what goes on below a mysqld process. inotify hooks into the filesystem handlers, and sees which files are accessed. You can then set triggers, or just display a tally over a certain period.

It has been a standard Linux kernel module since 2.6.13 (2005, wow that’s a long time ago already) and can be used through calls or the inotify-tools (commandline). So with the instrumentation already in the kernel, apt-get install inotify-tools is all you need to get started.

# inotifywatch -v -t 20 -r /var/lib/mysql/* /var/lib/mysql/zabbix/*
Establishing watches...
Setting up watch(es) on /var/lib/mysql/mysql/user.frm
OK, /var/lib/mysql/mysql/user.frm is now being watched.
[...]
Total of 212 watches.
Finished establishing watches, now collecting …

Several months ago, I started a little project at work, called Mockload. It started as a fun way of using the MySQL Proxy, to test our monitoring agent, as well as the rules engine and graphs on the Service Manager.

Why?
I needed a tool that would be easy to use, and improve over time. And that it would allow our QA team to send custom values to the service manager. The goal was to pretend having some very busy MySQL servers.

And what better tool, than the MySQL Proxy itself to pretend being a busy MySQL Server!
The way our agent collects the MySQL related data, is by issuing different sql queries. So, I thought that I could have a MySQL proxy instance in between …

I’ve started work on a c++ version of the Kontrollbase client script but am not as experienced in c++ as I’d like to be and don’t have the time to learn more c++ at the moment. The idea being that the client script written in perl has a lot of module dependencies and that complicates rolling out the client to large server farms. A compiled C++ script will be a drop-in solution.

So, if someone that is talented with c++ on Linux wants to help out the project and write a quick script involving a connection to mysql to run queries, and then connect to SNMP to gather system information, then export all of that to stdout as XML… let me know! I already have the MySQL part outputting XML so we just need the SNMP part and some error checking. Email me at themattreid at gmail dot com or commetnt on this post if interested. You’ll get credit on the project as a contributor.

A bug in libcurl affects how the heartbeat function of MySQL Enterprise Monitor works by sending it to an external website, often www.agent.com.

A bug in libcurl affects how the heartbeat function of MySQL Enterprise Monitor works by sending it to an external website, often www.agent.com.

A bug in libcurl affects how the heartbeat function of MySQL Enterprise Monitor works by sending it to an external website, often www.agent.com.

I’ve packaged up and released version 1.1.2 of the Cacti templates I’ve written for MySQL, Apache, memcached, nginx etc.

Anyone who would like to help write documentation (or do anything else, for that matter) is welcomed to participate. I’ll give commit access at the drop of a hat.

Changelog:

2009-05-07: version 1.1.2

        * The parsing code did not handle InnoDB plugin / XtraDB (issue 52).
        * The servername was hardcoded in ss_get_by_ssh.php (issue 57).
        * Added Handler_ graphs (issue 47).
        * Config files can be used instead of editing the .php file (issue 39).
        * binary log space is now calculated without a MySQL query (issue 48).
        * There was no easy way to force inputs to be filled (issue 45).
        * Some graphs were partially hidden without --lower-limit (issue 43).
        * Flipped some elements across the …