In this short blog post, I will show you how you can compare current and past time series in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

Recently, a support customer shared a graph with us that compared query throughput between today and yesterday as a confirmation that optimizing their server variables improved performance.

Do you want to compare workload between today and yesterday? This week and last week? Or this month and last month? You can do this by simply duplicating an existing data source of a graph, but add a time offset so it will render past data. You can specify past offsets in (s)econds, (m)inutes, (h)ours, (d)ays, (w)eeks and even (y)ears.

Say you want to graph query throughput from a certain time period and one day before that. To do this, select the “MySQL Overview” dashboard, and then click the header of “MySQL Questions” panel. The panel menu should appear:

Click the …

Thank you for attending my webinar on Wednesday, December 20, 2017, InnoDB Performance Optimization. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the webinar.

Are the T2 CPUs similar to the M4 series?

I would expect them to be similar. Amazon does not disclose what specific version of CPUs they use for T2 instances. More details are available here.

Delay in spinlock code is pretty old code. Need to optimize based on today’s CPU? Your views?

There have been a number of improvements to the InnoDB Spinlock code during the last few years. For example, using CPU …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to monitor Amazon Aurora using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

One impact of the growth of web services such as AWS on DBAs is the need to understand and report on database and application resource usage. DBAs have always had to monitor for performance-related usability issues, which may have led to investment in larger servers. However, services such as Aurora operate pricing models based on usage. Performance issues can be more closely attributed to rising costs, so badly performing systems more visibly affect the bottom line. DBA has become a cost center!

With that in mind, from Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.5 onwards, we delivered features that provide enhanced support for the performance monitoring of Amazon Aurora instances. “[Aurora] is a fully managed, …

As we close out the holiday season, let’s look at some data that tells us how to guarantee a successful Black Friday (from a database perspective).

There are certain peak times of the year where companies worldwide hold their breath in the hope that their databases do not become overloaded or unresponsive. A large percentage of yearly profits are achieved in a matter of hours during peak events. It is critical that the database environment remains online and responsive. According to a recent survey, users will not wait more than 2.5 seconds for a site to load before navigating elsewhere. Percona has partnered with many clients over the years to ensure success during these critical events. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the most responsive, stable open-source database environments in order to meet their business needs.

First Stop: Germany …

…but don’t just take our word for it… DBTA Trend-Setting Products for 2018

The online industry news magazine Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) has included Percona Monitoring and Management in its roundup of Trend-Setting Products in Data and Information Management for 2018.

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Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.3. This release contains fixes for bugs found after the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.2, as well as some important fixes and improvements not related to the previous release.

Improvements

• PMM-1874: The read timeout of the proxy server (/prometheus) has been increased from the default of 60 seconds to avoid nxginx gateway timeout error when loading data-rich dashboards.
• PMM-1863: We improved our handling of temporary Grafana credentials

Bug fixes

• …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.2. This release contains fixes to bugs found after Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.1 was released.

Bug fixes

• PMM-1790: QAN displayed query metrics even for a host that was not configured for mysql:queries or mongodb:queries. We have fixed the behaviour to display an appropriate warning message when there are no query metrics for the selected host.
• PMM-1826: If PMM Server 1.5.0 is deployed via Docker, the Update button would not upgrade the instance to a later release.
• …

In this post, we’ll examine how we’ve improved the GUI layout for Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5 by moving the Query Analytics (QAN) functions into the Grafana interface.

For Percona Monitoring and Management users, you might notice that QAN appears a little differently in our 1.5 release. We’ve taken steps to unify the PMM interface so that it feels more natural to move from reviewing historical trends in Metrics Monitor to examining slow queries in QAN.  Most significantly:

1. QAN moves from a stand-alone application into Metrics Monitor as a dashboard application
2. We updated the color scheme of QAN to match Metrics Monitor (but you can toggle a button if you prefer to still see QAN in white!)
3. Date picker and host selector now use the same methods as Metrics Monitor

…

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.1. This release contains fixes for bugs found after Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.0 was released.

Bug fixes

• PMM-1771: When upgrading PMM to 1.5.0 using Docker commands, PMM System Summary, PMM Add Instance, PMM Query Analytics dashboards were not available.
• PMM-1761: The PMM Query Analytics dashboard did not display the list of hosts correctly.
• …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring and Management 1.5.0 on November 28, 2017.

This release focuses on the following features:

• Enhanced support for MySQL on Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora – Dedicated Amazon Aurora dashboard offers maximum visibility into key database characteristics, eliminating the need for additional monitoring nodes.  We renamed Amazon RDS OS Metrics to Amazon RDS / Aurora MySQL Metrics
• Simpler configuration – Percona Monitoring and Management now offers easier configuration of key Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora settings via a web interface
• One-click data collection – One button retrieves vital information on server performance …