Author: Robert Agar

The monitoring of IT systems is an important practice that should be in place in any complex computing environment. It provides a window into the inner-workings of the systems and applications with which a business or organization operates. The statistics produced by a monitoring platform can be used to optimize systems, enhance the user experience or plan for capacity upgrades.

A viable monitoring platform is designed with the ability to generate and send alerts. This feature increases the utility of the tool by introducing the possibility of creating immediate notifications to address potential issues or inconsistencies in the systems being observed. Alerts are routed to individuals or teams who can take action to further investigate or resolve the problems. Let’s take a closer look at why you want alerts to be created and how your organization should handle them.

Why …

In week 5 of our Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog) blog series, we detail MySQL and MariaDB monitoring features with SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL, including real-time monitoring and monitoring MySQL error logs. If you missed it, you can read our previous post on understanding database performance trends.

Fast Startup Time to Start Monitoring

Database administrators can start monitoring MySQL and MariaDB servers in less than a single minute. The unique architecture and low-footprint of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL enable database administrators to install and configure all of the components that are required for monitoring MySQL and MariaDB servers very quickly.

The fast startup time is in sharp contrast with other monitoring and advisory …

Author: Robert Agar

An organization’s databases contain information that is essential for its survival. This may encompass sensitive customer data, employee records, online sales catalogs, and intellectual capital to name just a few uses of a database. The responsibility of keeping these vital resources available falls to the enterprise’s team of DBAs. Failure to properly maintain these systems can lead to serious negative consequences that can cripple a company’s ability to do business.

Almost every application of any real utility is backed by a database, which in turn is administered through a database management system (DBMS). MySQL is an extremely widely-used DBMS whose popularity is only exceeded by that of Oracle. Countless business-critical applications rely on the availability and performance of MySQL databases. A common …

Author: Robert Agar

The working life of a DBA is often centered on optimizing their systems to provide users with the best performance. There are many aspects of a MySQL implementation that can be tuned to increase its functionality. These improvements will result in a more efficient system and enhanced user experience.

One of the problems facing the DBA responsible for instituting performance tuning is to identify the particular areas to address that will impact the system in a positive manner. Approaching this task in a haphazard fashion is not advisable. Randomly modifying parameters is just as likely to cause further issues than to lead to performance gains. Luckily, there is a solution to this dilemma.

Conducting focused monitoring can be instrumental in enabling the DBA to pinpoint the source of performance degradation. Armed with this knowledge, informed decisions can be made regarding how …

In week 3 of our series, Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog), we discuss how to identify and analyze problematic SQL queries using SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL. If you missed it, feel free to read our previous post on Agentless Monitoring and Cloud Readiness.

Find Problematic SQL Queries

MySQL and MariaDB currently lack advanced tools for profiling SQL queries (such as SQL Profiler of Microsoft’ SQL Server). While other monitoring tools for MySQL and MariaDB provide monitoring and advisory information on various system metrics, they do not pinpoint the problematic SQL queries. No amount of hardware upgrades and tuning of the parameters in the database server configuration file ‘my.cnf’ and the database server initialization file …

Welcome back to our blog series, Benefits of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL (formerly Monyog). Last week, we discussed some of the challenges associated with MySQL and MariaDB database systems. Today, we dive in to additional features of SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL, including agentless monitoring technology, cloud readiness, and customization options.

Agentless Monitoring

Unlike other monitoring and advisory tools for MySQL and MariaDB, SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL does not require installing monitoring agents on each MySQL and MariaDB server. Installing and maintaining monitoring agents can be a complex administration task by itself.

SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL uses a standard MySQL connection for monitoring. To collect data for the operating system from remote database servers, …

MySQL 8 introduced a number of enhancements to improve both replication performance and the monitoring thereof. Improvements included more efficient replication of small updates on big JSON documents, the addition of Performance Schema tables for slave performance metrics, tracing and debug logging improvements, among others. With regards to monitoring, Group Replication has been improved by introducing new replication timestamps, additional columns to the performance schema, as well as by making the relationship between replication threads more efficient. We covered the various improvements to replication performance in the Replication Performance Enhancements in MySQL 8 blog. Today’s blog will provide some practical guidelines on monitoring your MySQL 8 master-slave and group (cluster) replication.

Two Types of MySQL Replication …

Since April 19th, when MySQL 8.0 became Generally Available (GA), the MySQL community has been abuzz with excitement over all of the new features and improvements. Many of new features were improvements to performance or monitoring, while others were specifically related to replication. We reviewed Replication Performance Enhancements in MySQL 8 recently. Today’s blog will describe how to set up a basic master-slave configuration with MySQL, using two servers on a single machine.

Replication Defined

MySQL replication is a process in which data from one MySQL database server (the master) is copied automatically to one or more MySQL database servers (the slaves). In the case of multiple slaves, these are usually referred to as a slave cluster. Replication should not to be confused with backup operations. Whereas the aim of backups is to protect the data and/or data structure, the role of replication is typically to spread …

The MySQL error log is an essential part of database server performance monitoring. Whenever something goes wrong or performance degrades, the Error Logs are usually the first place we look to start troubleshooting.

The MySQL Error Log is one of three related log types:

• The Error Log: It contains information about errors that occur while the server is running (as well as server start and stop events).
• The General Query Log: This is a general record of what mysqld is doing (connect, disconnect, queries).
• The Slow Query Log: It consists of “slow” SQL statements as defined in the long_query_time global variable.

You can enable error log monitoring to allow Monyog to keep an eye on your MySQL Error Log, and notify you when something goes awry. Moreover, Monyog combines the General Query, Slow Query and Error logs in a single view for both network and cloud servers. For example, in the …

MariaDB came into being the day that Oracle announced the purchase of Sun in 2010.  In order to keep it free under the GNU GPL, Michael Widenius forked MySQL and took several MySQL developers with him in the process.  Since then, MariaDB has been a drop-in replacement for MySQL, albeit with more features and better performance.

In the Improve MariaDB Performance using Query Profiling blog, we learned some useful techniques for tracking and analyzing slow queries using a couple of MariaDB server’s built-in tools: the Slow Query Log and the Performance Schema.  

The Slow Query Log records queries that are deemed to be slow and potentially problematic, that is, queries that take longer than the long_query_time global system variable value to run.

The Performance Schema is a storage engine …