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

…

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 …

Any software system requires secrets to run, be it credentials to communicate with databases, tokens to access resources, or encryption keys that need to be distributed. Secrets management means to deal with all kinds of secrets in a structured and secure way. In this blog entry we will show how to use Hashicorp Vault to […]

Earlier this year, I was presented with the challenge of streamlining user access to MySQL, allowing users self-serve access using their LDAP credentials, while logging all access. Of course, various MySQL forks allow for user auditing, but the solution is also needed to eventually support other data storage systems without native user auditing. This gave me the opportunity to do a trial integration of MySQL, Vault, ProxySQL, and LDAP; Vault would be used to dynamically create user accounts, and ProxySQL would be used to limit access and log activity. To evaluate the functionality and configuration of the integration, I used Docker to set up a test environment.

Below I will present the methods used to:

1. Provision the Docker environment.
2. Configure OpenLDAP. …