Regardless of the monitoring tool you use to monitor your databases, it can be better to monitor this tool.
No, it’s not a joke ! Do you think you can have a benefit with a monitoring tool not connected to your servers ? ( without being alerted )

I choose to talk about MONyog here but this can apply to all existing monitoring tools.
I just want to share the message, the tool does not matter, so, do it !

So, let me explain how to control if you have fresh data with MONyog.
With MONyog it’s easy because it’s an agentless monitoring tool.

There are two ways to check that :

Per server general info :

For each server, you can …

Part of my job at Percona is to perform customer audits.  I’ve had fun the last week getting up to speed on some of the great tools in the Percona Toolkit.  I’m sure people have talked about these before, but to be honest, I always found it hard to take the time to learn new tools, and at my previous job there were often a lot of tools in-house that made it easier to avoid learning something new.  The great thing about the Percona tools is that they aren’t environment dependent (as much as is possible), they typically only require Perl to run.

So, with that being said, I wanted to just go through a few of the tools I learned about this last week that I found useful.

pt-collect:

The collect script collects information.  A lot of information.  I ran it for 10 minutes on a customer’s server and …

Part of my job at Percona is to perform customer audits.  I’ve had fun the last week getting up to speed on some of the great tools in the Percona Toolkit.  I’m sure people have talked about these before, but to be honest, I always found it hard to take the time to learn new tools, and at my previous job there were often a lot of tools in-house that made it easier to avoid learning something new.  The great thing about the Percona tools is that they aren’t environment dependent (as much as is possible), they typically only require Perl to run.

So, with that being said, I wanted to just go through a few of the tools I learned about this last week that I found useful.

pt-collect:

The collect script collects information.  A lot of information.  I ran it for 10 minutes on a customer’s server and …

As announced on the Maatkit and Aspersa mailing lists, Daniel and I have created a new toolkit that represents the union of the two, and will be focusing efforts on this Percona Toolkit moving forward. The goal is to make them simpler and significantly more powerful, and to create more tools. The tools will continue to be open-source, but will be developed primarily to meet our MySQL support and consulting staff’s needs.

If you’re interested in challenging software engineering in Perl and shell, then please apply online. You can work online from anywhere, but I strongly prefer someone in the Americas timezones.

Further Reading:

• Planned change in Maatkit & Aspersa development …

Why This Post
While testing Yoshinori Matsunobo's MHA agent I found that although the wiki has a very complete documentation, it was missing a some details. This article intends to close that gap and bring up some issues to keep in mind when you do your own installation. At the end of the article I added a Conclusions section, if you're not interested in the implementation details, but to read my take on the project, feel free to jump straight to the end from here.

My Test Case
Most of our production environments can be simplified to match the MHA's agent most simple use case: 1 master w/ 2 or more slaves and at least one more slave in an additional tier:

Master A --> …

Although I no longer maintain hackmysql.com, I still actively develop MySQL tools. An article I wrote, 10 essential MySQL tools for admin, was published today. I hope no one’s feelings are hurt if their tool isn’t in the list, but it was rather difficult to compile the list given that so many tools are either not actively developed, not tested, or not well documented. Given lag time between writing and publishing, I was not able to write about Yoshinori’s MHA or newer tools. And given length constraints, I was not able to write about more tools. In any case, the world of MySQL tools is alive and well.

Back in February I wrote an article titled A Small Fix For mysql-agent. Since then we did a few more fixes to the agent and included a Bytes Behind Master (or BBM) chart. For those who can't wait to get their hands on the code, here's the current version: MySQL SNMP agent RPM. For those who'd like to learn about it's capabilities and issues, keep reading.

What to Expect From this Version
The article I quoted above pretty much describes the main differences with the original project, but we went further with the changes while still relying on Masterzen's code for the data collection piece.

The first big change is that we transformed Masterzen's code into a Perl module, …

I’ve been accepted to present at the brand-new and very exciting Postgres Open 2011 about system scaling, TCP traffic, and mathematical modeling. I’m really looking forward to it — it will be my first PostgreSQL conference in a couple of years! See you there.

Related posts:

1. Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference
2. O’Reilly MySQL 2011 conference CfP is open
3. My sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2011
4. …

I spent my day doing updates to the automysqlbackup script.  Here is some of what I’ve added over the last year.

The bug number fixes are from SourceForge.  https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=628964&group_id=101066&func=browse

# 2.5.5 MTG – (2011-07-21)
#    – Bug – Typo Ureadable Unreadable config file line 424 – ID: 3316825
#    – Bug – Change “#!/bin/bash” to “#!/usr/bin/env bash” – ID: 3292873
#    – Bug – problem with excludes – ID: 3169562
#    – Bug – Total disk space on symbolic links – ID: 3064547
#    – Added DEBUG option to only print the commands that will be executed.
#    – Bug – WHICH command didn’t work if there …

I’ve just sent an email to the Maatkit discussion list to announce a planned change to how Maatkit (and Aspersa) are developed. In short, Percona plans to create a Percona Toolkit of MySQL-related utilities, as a fork of Maatkit and Aspersa. I’m very happy about this change, and I welcome your responses to that thread on the discussion list.

Related posts:

1. Aspersa, a new opensource toolkit
2. Four companies to sponsor Maatkit development
3. How …