If you have set up per-process metrics in Percona Monitoring and Management, you may have found yourself in need of tuning it further to not only group processes together, but to display some of them in isolation. In this blogpost we will explore how to modify the rules for grouping processes, so that you can make the most out of this awesome PMM integration.

Let’s say you have followed the link above on how to set up the per-process metrics integration on PMM, and you have imported the dashboard to show these metrics. You will see something like the following:

This is an internal testing server we use, in which you can see a high number of VBoxHeadless (29) and mysqld (99) processes running. All the metrics in the dashboard will be grouped by the name of the command used. But, what if we …

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 …