As a MySQL database administrator, keeping a close eye on the performance of your MySQL server is crucial to ensure optimal database operations. A monitoring tool like Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a popular choice among open source options for effectively monitoring MySQL performance.

However, simply deploying a monitoring tool is not enough; you need to know which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor to gain insights into your MySQL server’s health and performance.

In this blog, we will explore various MySQL KPIs that are basic and essential to track using monitoring tools like PMM. We will also discuss related configuration variables to consider that can impact these KPIs, helping you gain a comprehensive understanding of your MySQL server’s performance and efficiency.

Let’s dive in …

2022 was an exciting year for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). We’ve added and improved many features, including Alerting and Backup Management. These updates are designed to keep databases running at peak performance and simplify database operations. But as companies grow and see more demand for their databases, we need to ensure that PMM also remains scalable so you don’t need to worry about its performance while tending to the rest of your environment.

PMM2 uses VictoriaMetrics (VM) as its metrics storage engine. Percona’s co-Founder Peter Zaitsev wrote a detailed post about migration from Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics, One of the most significant differences in …

Earlier in the year, I was working on an issue where one of my clients had reported a massive influx in connection on their hosts after enabling Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). This was something I had not seen before and after researching for a couple of days I discovered that if you monitor a MySQL instance with PMM configured to collect table statistics, and if the tables that it’s gathering statistics from are Federated, it will generate a connection on the remote host for the Federated tables, one for each Federated table in the instance. Let’s go over the details and provide some examples so we can understand this a bit better.

First, I’ll offer a reminder that a Federated table is simply a table that you can put in your MySQL instance that is empty locally and uses a network connection to get the data from …

In my previous blog post, ProcFS UDF: A Different Approach to Agentless Operating System Observability in Your Database, I wrote about the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin, which allows you to get operating systems stats, through the MySQL database, without having shell access to the server and any local agent installation.

Some of you wondered whether there is a way to use this goodness in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), and this blog post will show you exactly how to do that.

Unfortunately, at this point, Percona Monitoring and Management does not support the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin out of the box. It is in the backlog, along with many other cool things. However, …

In this blog, I will demonstrate how to use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to find out the reason why the MySQL server is stalling. I will use only one typical situation for the MySQL server stall in this example, but the same dashboards, graphs, and principles will help you in all other cases.

Nobody wants it but database servers may stop handling connections at some point. As a result, the application will slow down and then will stop responding.

It is always better to know about the stall from a monitoring instrument rather than from your own customers.

PMM is a great help in this case. If you look at its graphs and notice that many of them started showing unusual behavior, you need to react. In the case of stalls, you will see that either some activity went to 0 or, otherwise, it increased to high …

Some of you may use MySQL’s asynchronous replication feature called Semisynchronous Replication (aka semi-sync), and now with the MySQL Semi-Sync Summary Dashboard + Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), you can see the most important metrics! Refer to the Install & Usage steps for deployment details (note you need Replication Set defined!).

What is Semisynchronous Replication

When enabled, Semisynchronous Replication instructs the Primary to wait until at least one replica has received and logged the event to the replica’s local relay log before completing the COMMIT on a transaction. This provides a higher level of data integrity because now it is known that the data exists in two places. This feature ensures a …

Optimizing MySQL performance and troubleshooting MySQL problems are two of the most critical and challenging tasks for MySQL DBAs. The databases powering applications need to be able to handle changing traffic workloads while remaining responsive and stable in order to deliver an excellent user experience. Further, DBAs are also expected to find cost-efficient means of solving these issues.

In this webinar, we will demonstrate the advanced options of Percona Monitoring and Management V.2 that enable you to solve these challenges, which are built on free and open-source software. We will look at specific, common MySQL problems and review them.

Please join Peter Zaitsev on Wednesday, April 14th, 2021, at 11 am EDT for his webinar Optimize and Troubleshoot MySQL using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

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Hi and thanks to all who attended my webinar on Tuesday, January 26th titled Using PMM to Identify & Troubleshoot Problematic MySQL Queries!

Like we do after all our webinars, we compile the list of questions that were answered verbally and also those that were posed yet remained unanswered since we ran out of time during the broadcast.  Before we get to the questions, I wanted to make sure to include a link to the RED Method for MySQL Queries by Peter Zaitsev, Percona’s CEO:

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/12470

Hi Michael, you suggested that table create and update times should be ignored. Surely these values come from information_schema.tables? Does that not reflect what I would see …

Understanding how MySQL uses memory is key to tuning it for optimal performance as well as troubleshooting cases of unexpected memory usage, i.e. when you have MySQL Server using a lot more than you would expect based on your configuration settings.

Early in MySQL history, understanding memory usage details was hard and included a lot of guesswork.  Is it possible that some queries running require a large temporary table or allocated a lot of memory for stored user variables?  Are any stored procedures taking an unexpectedly high amount of memory? All could be reasons for excessive MySQL memory usage, but you would not easily see if that is just the case.

All that changed with MySQL 5.7, which added memory instrumentation in Performance Schema, and with MySQL 8.0, this instrumentation is enabled by default, so you can get this data from pretty much any running instance.

If you’re looking for current memory …

Visibility is a blessing, and with databases, visibility is a must. That’s true not only for metrics but for the queries themselves. Having info on all the stats around query execution is priceless, and Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) offers that in the form of the Query Analytics dashboard (QAN).

But where to start? QAN helps you with that by calculating the query profile. What is the profile? It’s a rank of queries, ordered by Load, so it is easy to spot the heaviest queries hitting your database. The Load is defined as the “Average Active Queries” but can also be defined as a mix of Query Execution Time Plus Query count. In other words, all the time the query was alive and kicking.

The Profile in PMM 2.10.0 looks like this:

The purpose of this profile is to facilitate the task of finding the …