In this short blog post, I will show you how you can compare current and past time series in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

Recently, a support customer shared a graph with us that compared query throughput between today and yesterday as a confirmation that optimizing their server variables improved performance.

Do you want to compare workload between today and yesterday? This week and last week? Or this month and last month? You can do this by simply duplicating an existing data source of a graph, but add a time offset so it will render past data. You can specify past offsets in (s)econds, (m)inutes, (h)ours, (d)ays, (w)eeks and even (y)ears.

Say you want to graph query throughput from a certain time period and one day before that. To do this, select the “MySQL Overview” dashboard, and then click the header of “MySQL Questions” panel. The panel menu should appear:

Click the …