Traditionally infrastructure management is a manual task, with sysadmins managing rather static servers. The automation capabilities of modern cloud platforms have changed this way of working: Infrastructure is often described “as code,” e.g. in a git repository, and changes are made by infrastructure management systems automatically. As a result infrastructure is much less static and turnaround […]

When deployed through Docker Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) uses environment variables for its configuration

For example, if you want to adjust metrics resolution you can pass

-e METRICS_RESOLUTION=Ns

  as  an option to the

docker run

  command:

docker run -d \
  -p 80:80 \
  --volumes-from pmm-data \
  --name pmm-server \
  --restart always \
  -e METRICS_RESOLUTION=2s \
  percona/pmm-server:latest

You would think if you want to change the setting for existing installation you can just stop the container with

docker stop

…

This walks you through the steps to install the Community Edition of Docker on Fedora 27. If you’ve been living under a rock for a few years, Docker is an open source container virtualization software.

Docker or Docker Community Edition is a necessary step if you want to install something like Microsoft’s SQL Server on Fedora because only these are supported platforms:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 or 7.4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server V12 SP2
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Docker Engine 1.8+

The first step requires you to add the docker-ce repo to your instance with he curl utility, which should already be installed in most cases. You can check whether the curl utility is available with the which command, like: …

I’ve been posting quite a bit about Docker as I’ve been working with it a lot as of late. I thought I would share something interesting I discovered a couple weeks ago while working on setting up a Docker container-based lab environment for training purposes here at Pythian, specifically when attempting to install the MySQL-python package inside the container.

I know what you’re thinking: why is he trying to install a package in a Docker container? Doesn’t that go against the “Docker run and forget about it” philosophy? Sure, but in this case, I’m looking to add orchestration via ansible, which I don’t think is completely out of the question in order to coordinate your Docker containers for something like replication. This requires using the …

In a recent post, my colleague and teammate Peter Sylvester explained how we could customize MySQL’s configuration when running it as a Docker container.

Today I want to show you how to debug a Dockerized MySQL process. Let me start by showing you how I am starting my test container:

[fipar@coltrane ~]$ sudo docker run --memory-swappiness=1 -p 3308:3306 --name=mysql1 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -d mysql/mysql-server:5.7
Unable to find image 'mysql/mysql-server:5.7' locally
Trying to pull repository docker.io/mysql/mysql-server ...
5.7: Pulling from docker.io/mysql/mysql-server
Digest: sha256:eb3aa08c047efcb3e6bfcc3a28b80a2ec8c67b4315712b26679b0b22320f0b4a
Status: Downloaded newer image for docker.io/mysql/mysql-server:5.7 …

It’s very easy to install Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on DigitalOcean. If you’ve never used DigitalOcean before, you will find that it is user-friendly and not very expensive. For $5/month you can easily host your PMM on it, letting you monitor your simple infrastructure or try out PMM before implementing it to monitor your production environments.

Let’s prepare the DigitalOcean instance

Log in to DigitalOcean (DO) control panel and click “Create Droplet.”

Thanks to DO you can skip the boring OS setup and save time by using the Docker “One click app” in DO and the Docker image from PMM.

Note: After clicking on “Docker…” choose an instance size that accommodates your budget – PMM can run on as little as the 1GB 1vCPU instance!

Note: Scroll again!

Next step – select a nearby region …

In a previous post I had mentioned that I was doing a bit of digging into Docker in order to get a better grasp of the technology. Part of that was exploring common administrative tasks. I would venture to say that backups are probably among the most important tasks we take on with database administration, so it’s important to know how to do this for Docker MySQL instances.

There is a fair bit of documentation on how to handle this logically (mysqldump / mydumper) as this is a simple task to perform as long as you can connect to the database instance, so I wanted to approach physical backups using the very common xtrabackup tool. Additionally, we’re trying to think with containers here, so I wanted to make sure that not only would I be taking a backup of the Docker container MySQL instance, but I would do it with another Docker container running …

In this blog post, I will show you how easy it is to set up a Percona Monitoring and Management server on Google Compute Engine from the command line.

First off you will need to have a Google account and install the Cloud SDK tool. You need to create a GCP (Google Cloud Platform) project and enable billing to proceed. This blog assumes you are able to authenticate and SSH into instances from the command line.

Here are the steps to install PMM server in Google Cloud Platform.

1) Create the Compute engine instance with the following command. The example creates an Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS compute instance in the us-west1-b zone with a 100GB persistent disk. For production systems it would be best to use a 500GB disk instead (size=500GB). This should be …

In recent weeks I’ve been focusing on Docker in order to get a much better understanding of the containerized world that is materializing in front of us. Containers aren’t just for stateless applications anymore and we’re seeing more cases where MySQL and other databases are being launched in a containerized fashion, so it’s important to know how to configure your MySQL container!

In docker hub, you will see an option for this by doing a volume mount from the docker host to the container on /etc/mysql/conf.d. But the problem is that the container image you’re using may not have an !includedir referencing the conf.d directory, much like the latest version of mysql community, as you will see below.

 …

In this blog, I will show you how to install PMM on Linode as a low-cost database monitoring solution.

Many of my friends use Linode to run their personal sites, as well as small projects. While Linode is no match for Big Cloud providers in features, it is really wonderful when it comes to cost and simplicity: a Linode “nanode” instance offers 1GB of memory, 1 core, 20GB of storage and 1TB of traffic for just $5 a month.

A single Linode instance is powerful enough to use with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to monitor several systems, so I use Linode a lot when I want to demonstrate PMM deployment through Docker, rather than …