I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

Spread the word; Just added Kontrollbase to MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=318

Spread the word; Just added Kontrollbase to MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=318

It's always fun when you come into work and notice that one of your database monitors/graphs has changed from showing almost no row accesses/sec to 40,000 rows/sec in a matter of minutes. And then by lunch time they are showing 90,000 rows/sec. What's up with that?MySQL Enterprise Monitor Row Accesses:Well, of course the first thing you do is check all your cacti monitors, because there is

Merlin is MySQL’s Enterprise Monitor, a system designed to monitor a number of MySQL database servers and provide useful feedback to the DBAs as to how they are running and what things may require attention.

It provides various things:

• graphs of key database and server performance indicators: load average, cpu usage and mysql specific information such as number of database connections, replication delays, buffer usage statistics, etc…
• a set of advisors which are intended to tell you if things are not configured properly and what to do to correct the problem.
• monitoring of servers which are linked together through replication
• the latest version of merlin (v2.0, which has been available since the beginning of the year) additionally adds via mysql proxy the ability to see all the queries which are …

Giving a bunch of mysql instances something you do everyday and you might think ….. how should I do it? Write a bunch of selects and inserts manually? nahh that takes s**tload of time, should I run binlogs collected from a live system on my test server? nahh thats not practical nor is it real since it doesn’t contain selects, should I gather the general query log and try that out? nahhh  …..

MySQL has been kind enough to supply us with their mysql_slap which does the job for us and given I needed to do a proof of concept on monitoring a group of 4 circular replicated servers I wrote a small script which does the job of slapping them with a varying level of concurrancy, iterations, number of queries and connections for as long as you like.

Here it is and I hope some of you might find it useful for slapping their own test servers :).

#!/bin/bash

NumberOfConcurrentLoads=4
…

It’s been a while since I’ve sent any news about the MySQL Cacti Templates project I started a while ago. Here’s what’s new:

First of all, it’s not just MySQL templates anymore. It’s a generic framework and tools for creating templates, and I’ve written templates for Apache, Memcached, etc. I just haven’t publicized [...]

Since a few months we are monitoring our infrastructure at Days of Wonder with OpenNMS. Until this afternoon we were running the beta/final candidate version 1.5.93.

We are monitoring a few things with the JDBC Stored Procedure Poller, which is really great to monitor complex business operations without writing remote or GP scripts.

Unfortunately the migration to OpenNMS 1.6.1 led me to discover that the JDBC Stored Procedure poller was not working anymore, crashing with a NullPointerException in the MySQL JDBC Driver while trying to fetch the output parameter.

In fact it turned out I was plain wrong. I was using a MySQL PROCEDURE:

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE `check_for_something`()
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
SELECT …

Monolith: MySQL server monitoring. I only have servers that run Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu Linux x86 and x86_64. I don’t have machines to test MySQL monitoring for the following OSes. Perhaps you would like to be a test candidate for the new version of Monolith? If so, let me know and you’ll be on the list, as well as get beta testing credit.

OSX Server: PPC and Intel

AIX

FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD

Windows Server

Solaris: Intel & Sparc

Linux servers that are NOT Intel based.

What this involves: testing the client script, perl modules, snmp stats, and other functions that may require a custom client script for that architecture.