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 …

Recently I was working with a customer wherein our focus was to carry out a performance audit of their multiple MySQL database nodes. We started looking into the stats of the performance schema. While working, the customer raised two interesting questions: how can he make complete use of the performance schema, and how can he find what he requires? I realized that it is important to understand the insights of the performance schema and how we can make effective use of it. This blog should make it easier to understand for everyone.

The performance schema is an engine in MySQL which can easily be checked whether enabled or not using SHOW ENGINES. It is entirely built upon various sets of instruments (also can be called event names) each serving different purposes.

Instruments are the main part of the performance schema. It is useful when I want to investigate a problem and its root causes. Some of the examples are …

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 …

In the previous posts of this series, I presented how the Percona Support team approaches the analysis and troubleshooting of a MySQL server using a tried-and-tested method supported by specific tools found in the Percona Toolkit:

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 1: The Percona Support Way

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 2: Knowing the Server

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 3: What MySQL?

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 4: An Engine in …

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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MySQL Shell is the advanced MySQL client, which has many excellent features. In this blog, I am going to explain the MySQL shell commands “\show” and “\watch”. Both commands are very useful to monitor the MySQL process. It provides more insights into the foreground and background threads as well. 

Overview

“\show” and “\watch” are the MySQL shell commands, which can be executed using the Javascript (JS), Python (Py), and SQL interfaces. Both commands are providing the same information, but the difference is you can refresh the results when using the command “\watch”. The refresh interval is two seconds. 

• \show: Run the specified report using the provided options and arguments.
• \watch: Run the specified report using the provided options and arguments, and refresh the results at regular intervals.

Below are the available options you can use with the “\show” …

Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) for MySQL databases is an important feature that is essential and covers common use cases, like a recovery to the latest possible transaction or roll-back the database to a specific date before some bad query was executed. Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) added support for PITR in version 1.7, and in this blog post we are going to look into the technical details and decisions we made to implement this feature.

Architecture Decisions Store Binary Logs on Object Storage

MySQL uses …