Prometheus 2 time series database (TSDB) is an amazing piece of engineering, offering a dramatic improvement compared to “v2” storage in Prometheus 1 in terms of ingest performance, query performance and resource use efficiency. As we’ve been adopting Prometheus 2 in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), I had a chance to look into the performance of Prometheus 2 TSDB. This blog post details my observations.

Understanding the typical Prometheus workload

For someone who has spent their career working with general purpose databases, the typical workload of Prometheus is quite interesting. The ingest rate tends to remain very …

Percona has revealed the line-up of in-depth tutorials for the Percona Live Europe 2018 Open Source Database Conference, taking place November 5–7, 2018 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Secure your spot now with Advanced Registration prices. Be sure to buy your tickets soon as tickets prices will only head up, not down! Sponsorship opportunities for the conference are still available.

Percona Live Europe 2018 Open Source Database Conference is the premier open source database event. Our theme this year is “Connect. Accelerate. Innovate.”  Percona Live is the …

A few months ago I wrote a blog post on How to Capture Per Process Metrics in PMM. Since that time, Nick Cabatoff has made a lot of improvements to Process Exporter and I’ve improved the Grafana Dashboard to match.

I will not go through installation instructions, they are well covered in original blog post.  This post covers features available in release 0.4.0 Here are a few new features you might find of …

In my previous blog post, I showed how to deploy Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on Linode manually. It is pretty simple, but with a little coding it can be done even more easily using StackScripts

Here’s how:

1. Click on the “Add a Linode” and pick a Linode type you want to deploy.

2. Click on the deployed Linode and then click on the “Rebuild” Link

3. Click on Deploy Using StackScripts

4. On the resulting page search for “PMM” and pick PMMServer from PerconaLab.

5. Provide the host name for new Linode, pick the root password and click on “Rebuild”

6. Boot the server.

7.  You’re done. Wait for about 5 minutes for the installation to complete, then you can see PMM interface by going to this Linode …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

We’re releasing hotfix 1.14.1 to address two issues found post-release of 1.14.0:

• PMM-2963: Upgrading to PMM 1.14.0 fails due to attempting to create already existing Dashboard
  • Our upgrade script incorrectly tried to create dashboards that already existed, and generating failure message:

    A folder or dashboard in the general folder with the same name …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL® and MongoDB® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.



We’ve included a plethora of visual improvements in this release, including:

• PostgreSQL Metrics Collection – Visualize PostgreSQL performance!
• Identify New Queries in Query Analytics
• New Dashboard: Compare System Parameters
• New Dashboard: PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA Wait Events Analysis
• Dashboard Updates – Advanced Data Exploration, MyRocks, TokuDB, InnoDB Metrics …

Do you need to modify the metrics collected from Linux by Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)? In this blog post we will see how to enable, disable, and update collected metrics on PMM’s linux:metrics exporter. 

We will assume that the PMM client packages are installed, and they are configured already.

Using a custom list of metrics

Let’s now suppose we are not yet collecting any metrics on our desired client server, and we want to enable only the following: diskstats, meminfo, netdev and vmstat. We can use the following …

In his excellent blog post, Pavel Trukhanov showed the value of S.M.A.R.T. metric collections, so I wondered how hard would it be to enable their collection in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)

A quick search led me to the  text_collector plugin SmartMon, which can be easily integrated with any Prometheus Installation

For PMM, Vadim Yalovets recently showed how to do …

One of the common ways to classify database workloads is whether it is  “read intensive” or “write intensive”. In other words, whether the workload is dominated by reads or writes.

Why should you care? Because recognizing if the workload is read intensive or write intensive will impact your hardware choices, database configuration as well as what techniques you can apply for performance optimization and scalability.

This question looks trivial on the surface, but as you go deeper—complexity emerges. There are different “levels” of reads and writes for you to consider. You can also choose to look at event counts or at the time it takes to do operations. These can provide very different responses, especially as the cost difference between a single read and a single write can be an order of magnitude.

Let’s examine the TPC-C Benchmark from this point of view, or more specifically its …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution for system monitoring. Sometimes, though, you’ll have the need for a metric that’s not present in the list of node_exporter metrics out of the box. In this post, we introduce a simple method and show how to extend the list of available metrics without modifying the node_exporter code. It’s based on the textfile collector.

Enable the textfile collector in pmm-client

This collector is not enabled by default in the latest version of pmm-client. So, first let’s enable the textfile collector.

# pmm-admin rm linux:metrics
OK, removed system pmm-client-hostname from monitoring.
# pmm-admin …