Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution for system monitoring. Sometimes, though, you’ll have the need for a metric that’s not present in the list of node_exporter metrics out of the box. In this post, we introduce a simple method and show how to extend the list of available metrics without modifying the node_exporter code. It’s based on the textfile collector.

Enable the textfile collector in pmm-client

This collector is not enabled by default in the latest version of pmm-client. So, first let’s enable the textfile collector.

# pmm-admin rm linux:metrics
OK, removed system pmm-client-hostname from monitoring.
# pmm-admin …

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018, as he presents Databases in the Hosted Cloud at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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Nearly everyone today uses some form of database in the hosted cloud. You can use hosted MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server, and PostgreSQL in several cloud providers as a database as a service (DBaaS).

In this webinar, Colin Charles explores how to efficiently deploy a cloud database configured for optimal performance, with a particular focus on MySQL.

You’ll learn the differences between the various public cloud offerings for Amazon RDS including Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Rackspace OpenStack …

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Forking or Branching – Lessons from the MySQL Community on Tuesday, August 28th, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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The MySQL Community offers a great example of various forks and branches, with MariaDB being the most well-known fork, and companies like Percona, Facebook and Alibaba maintaining their own branches.

In this presentation we will look at the history of MySQL, the causes of MySQL forking and branching, and …

Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Grading is underway for talks at Percona Live Europe 2018. I understand that by next week you will see the tutorial schedule released. As part of the program committee, I have enjoyed reviewing tutorials, and I reckon there is great competition for the schedule. I suggest you register now, and don’t forget to book your accommodation (need a discount?).

A video worth watching: …

If you are using large EBS GP2 volumes for MySQL (i.e. 10TB+) on AWS EC2, you can increase performance and save a significant amount of money by moving to local SSD (NVMe) instance storage. Interested? Then read on for a more detailed examination of how to achieve cost-benefits and increase performance from this implementation.

EBS vs Local instance store

We have heard from customers that large EBS GP2 volumes can be affected by short term outages—IO “stalls” where no IO is going in or out for a couple of minutes. Statistically, with so many disks in disk arrays (which back EBS volumes) we can expect frequent disk failures. If we allocate a very large EBS GP2 volume, i.e. 10Tb+, hitting such failure events can be common.

In the case of MySQL/InnoDB, such an IO “stall” will be obvious, particularly with the highly loaded system where MySQL needs to do physical IO. During the stall, you will see all write queries …

Recently, we initiated a new project, the Open Source Database Community Blog. One way to think of this is as an online, year round version of the Percona Live conferences. If you have a story to tell, an experience to share, or a lesson to be learned send it along. As long as it’s related to open source database software, their management and application. That’s right. Not just Percona software. Any open source database software of all formats.

Unlike Percona Live, though, we are not limited by time or space. All submissions are welcome as long as they follow some simple guidelines.

We have already had some excellent posts, and in case this is news to you, here’s a recap:

• Renato Losio wrote this succinct how-to article …

In Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.13 we have adopted Prometheus 2, and with this comes a dramatic improvement in resource usage, along with performance improvements!

What does it mean for you? This means you can have a significantly larger number of servers and database instances monitored by the same PMM installation. Or you can reduce the instance size you use to monitor your environment and save some money.

Let’s look at some stats!

CPU Usage

We can see an approximate 5x and 8x reduction of CPU usage on these two PMM Servers. Depending on the workload, we see CPU usage reductions to range between 3x and 10x.

Disk Writes

There is also less disk write bandwidth required:

On this instance, the bandwidth reduction is “just” 1.5x times. …

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to set a replication from MySQL 8.0 to MySQL 5.7. There are some situations that having this configuration might help. For example, in the case of a MySQL upgrade, it can be useful to have a master that is using a newer version of MySQL to an older version slave as a rollback plan. Another example is in the case of upgrading a master x master replication topology.

Officially, replication is only supported between consecutive major MySQL versions, and only from a lower version master to a higher version slave. Here is an example of a supported scenario:

5.7 master –> 8.0 slave

while the opposite is not supported:

8.0 master –> 5.7 slave

In this blog post, I’ll walk through how to overcome the …

The main focus of a previous blog post was the performance of MyRocks when using fast SSD devices. However, I figured that MyRocks would be beneficial for use in cloud workloads, where storage is either slow or expensive.

In that earlier post, we demonstrated the benefits of MyRocks, especially for heavy IO workloads. Meanwhile, Mark wrote in his blog that the CPU overhead in MyRocks might be significant for CPU-bound workloads, but this should not be the issue for IO-bound workloads.

In the cloud the cost of resources is a major consideration. Let’s review the annual cost for the processing and storage …

Please join Percona’s CEO, Peter Zaitsev as he presents Using MySQL for Distributed Database Architectures on Tuesday, July 31st, 2018 at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

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In modern data architectures, we’re increasingly moving from single-node design systems to distributed architectures using multiple nodes – often spread across multiple databases and multiple continents. Such architectures bring many benefits (such as scalability and resiliency), but can also bring a lot of pain if incorrectly designed and …