Innotop is a very useful tool to monitor innodb information in real time. This tool is written by Baron Schwartz who is also an author of “High Performance MySQL, Second edition” book. [Side note: I highly recommend getting this book when it comes out (in June, 08?). Other authors include: Peter Zaitsev, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, Vadim Tkachenko and Derek J. Balling.] Quick summary of what innotop can monitor (from: http://innotop.sourceforge.net/): InnoDB transactions and internals, queries and processes, deadlocks, foreign key errors, replication status, system variables and status and much more.

Following are the instructions on how to install innotop on CentOS x64/Fedora/RHEL (Redhat enterprise). Most probably same instructions can be used on all flavors of Linux. If not, leave me a comment and I will research a solution for you. Let us start with downloading innotop. I used version 1.6.0 which is the latest at the time of …

I have an issue I hope someone can help me with. I am generating RRDtool graphs (for Cacti monitoring templates for MySQL, which I’ll release soon) that have up to 11 different metrics on them. With that many lines or areas on a graph, it becomes very hard to pick colors that are easy to see and easy to distinguish from each other. What’s a good way to choose such colors? Is there a way to do it automatically — is there a formal method that will produce good results?

I know some color theory and I have read about how you can distinguish colors from each other (hue, value etc). But I am unsure the best way to choose this many colors. Trying by hand produces garish results or graphs that are just hard to read.

My first attempt to solve this with a program was to simply create …