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 …

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a great community tool for monitoring your OSDB (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) fleet. It’s feature rich, and it’s built and distributed as open-source based on several de-facto industry standard tools such as Grafana and Prometheus. In the second half of last year, major version 2 was released and whereas the major components remained mostly the same, some significant architectural changes were made, but this is out-of-scope for this post.

Upgrading to PMM2 is basically the same as starting from scratch with a fresh install; it requires re-adding all your servers, which can be a painful process if you have a large fleet of instances. For servers where you have OS level access, you can just install the PMM2 agent, but for RDS there is no access to the OS so another approach is required. In this blog, I will focus on getting a large number of RDS instances added.

Adding RDS instances …

When I speak about MySQL performance troubleshooting (or frankly any other database), I tend to speak about four primary resources which typically end up being a bottleneck and limiting system performance: CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network.

It would be great if when seeing what resource is a bottleneck, we could also easily see what queries contribute the most to its usage and optimize or eliminate them. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it may seem.

First, MySQL does not really provide very good instrumentation in those terms, and it is not easy to get information on how much CPU usage, Disk IO, or Memory a given query caused.  Second, direct attribution is not even possible in a lot of cases. For example, disk writes from flushing data from the InnoDB buffer pool in the …

A few days ago, a customer got in touch asking how they could use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to monitor the roles played by each node in an InnoDB cluster. More specifically, they wanted to check when one of the nodes changed its role from Primary to Secondary, or vice-versa. PMM allows for a high level of flexibility and customization through its support for custom queries, and we just have to be creative on how we approach the problem. In this post, we present the steps we did to test our solution, including the deployment of a 3-node InnoDB Cluster hosted in the same server (for testing) and a PMM 2 server, and connecting them together. Even though this has already been covered in other blog …

Even though Percona Monitoring and Management 2 (PMM) comes with a lot of dashboards and metrics out of the box, sometimes we need to extend the default metrics by running custom MySQL queries.

For example, suppose you want to have information about cached indexes from Innodb tables from innodb_cached_indexes table. That metric is not being captured by any default dashboard, but it is possible to extend PMM and make it capture the result of custom queries.

Getting Started With Custom Queries

Custom queries can be added to mysqld_exporter by adding them to the appropriate config file in /usr/local/percona/pmm2/collectors/custom-queries/mysql. There are three subdirectories inside it: high-resolution, low-resolution, and medium-resolution. PMM allows …

We are proud to announce that Percona was selected as a participating organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 program, this is our second year as a participating org with the GSoC program.

GSoC is a great program to involve young student developers in open source projects. We participated in the program in 2019 for the first time and we were really happy and satisfied with the results.
Percona Platform Engineering team decided to participate again for the 2020 program and we are glad and really happy to inform you that we were selected and welcome the student to work with our team during the summer of 2020 on their GSoC Project.

Preparations

We started planning for GSoC around November-December 2019, with the help from our Product Management team, we were able to shortlist a few ideas which we thought were really the right fit for …

If you’re using MySQL’s Performance Schema you may use “query digests” as IDs to identify specific query patterns in the events_statements_summary_by_digest Performance Schema Table.

You might assume these hashes are stable between different versions, so, for example, when upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8, you can compare the query response time and other execution details for the same hashes as part of your upgrade process and have confidence that queries run the same (or better) after the upgrade.   Unfortunately, you can’t.

For some reason, the hashing algorithm is different between MySQL 5.6,  MySQL 5.7, and MySQL 8 even for the most trivial queries:

MySQL 5.6

mysql> select digest,digest_text  from events_statements_summary_by_digest where digest_text='commit';
+----------------------------------+-------------+
| digest                           | digest_text | …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) has been on the road for a while now, and it brings exciting new features and improvements. For those who are not familiar with the tool, PMM allows deep insight into the performance of applications and databases. The most crucial highlight: it is 100% open-source. Also, the source code is present on GitHub.

Back to new features and improvements. One of them, that customers were requesting, was the support for LDAP. This feature finally arrived with PMM version 2 thanks to the new version of Grafana, and I intend to demonstrate in …

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is built upon the shoulder of giants like Prometheus and Grafana. And speaking of Grafana, one of the coolest features that come with it is the ability to customize the experience through 3rd party plugins.

Plugins are an easy way to enhance the ability to have specialized graphs. One case that we saw in Managed Services is the ability to have a throughput graph, that shows QPS vs Threads running. This is different in essence of the “default” graphs that show a metric against time (time being the X-axis) since what we wanted is to show queries per second not during a time (that graph already exists) but for specific values of threads.

One way to achieve that is by using a plugin called Plotly …

As Grafana powers our star product – Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) – we have developed a lot of experience creating Grafana Dashboards over the last few years.   In this article, I will share some of the considerations for designing Grafana Dashboards. As usual, when it comes to questions of design they are quite subjective, and I do not expect you to chose to apply all of them to your dashboards, but I hope they will help you to think through your dashboard design better.

Design Practical Dashboards

Grafana features many panel types, and even more are available as plugins. It may be very attractive to use many of them in your dashboards using many different visualization options. Do not!  Stick to a few data visualization patterns and only add additional visualizations when they provide …