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

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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 blog post, I investigate a case of spiking InnoDB Rows inserted in the absence of a write query, and find internal temporary tables to be the culprit.

Recently I was investigating an interesting case for a customer. We could see the regular spikes on a graph depicting “InnoDB rows inserted” metric (jumping from 1K/sec to 6K/sec), however we were not able to correlate those spikes with other activity. The

innodb_row_inserted

 graph (picture from PMM demo) looked similar to this (but on a much larger scale):

Other graphs (Com_*, Handler_*) did not show any spikes like that. I’ve examined the logs (we were not able to enable general log or change the threshold of the slow log), performance_schema, triggers, stored procedures, prepared statements and even reviewed the binary logs. However, I was not able to find any single …

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

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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.
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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 …

Do you need to get to grips with MySQL proxies? Or maybe you could do with discovering the latest developments and plans for Percona’s software?

Well, wait no more because …

on Wednesday November 15, 2017, we bring you a webinar double bill.

Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents “The Proxy Wars – MySQL Router, ProxySQL, MariaDB MaxScale” at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Reflecting on his past experience with MySQL proxies, Colin will provide a short review of three open source solutions. He’ll run through a comparison of MySQL Router, MariaDB MaxScale and ProxySQL and talk about the reasons for using the right tool for an application.

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