The Percona Monitoring Plugins are high-quality components to add enterprise-grade MySQL capabilities to your existing in-house, on-premises monitoring solutions. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios, Cacti and Zabbix, and are delivered in the form of templates, plugins, and scripts.
At Percona, our experience helping customers with emergencies informs our monitoring strategies. We have analyzed a large database of emergency issues, and used that to determine the best conditions to monitor. You can read about our suggested approaches to monitoring in our white papers.
Monitoring generally takes two forms:
Fault detection.
Fault detection notifies you when systems become unhealthy or unavailable. In general, fault detection monitoring tends to fail because of false alarms, which cause personnel to ignore the alerts or not notice when the monitoring system itself fails. As a result, it is very important to choose very carefully when you monitor for faults: monitor only on actionable conditions that are not prone to false positives, and definitely indicate a problem, but do not duplicate other information or tell you something you already know. The classic example of a poor-quality check is a cache hit ratio, or a threshold such as the number of sort merges per second.
Metrics collection and graphing.
By contrast to fault detection, it is a good idea to collect and store as much performance and status information about the systems as possible, for as long as possible, and to have a means of visualizing it as graphs or charts. These are good to glance at periodically, but they are really most useful when you are trying to diagnose a condition whose existence you have already identified. For example, if you see a period of degraded service on one chart, you might look at other charts to try to determine what changed during that period.
In summary, you should alert as much as you need, no more no less, and prefer fewer alerts on broader conditions. You should never ignore an alert. But you should collect as many metrics as possible, and ignore most of them until you need them.
We make our monitoring components freely available under the GNU GPL. If you would like help setting up the components, integrating them into your environment, choosing alerts, or any other task, Percona consulting and support staff can help.
You can download the Percona Monitoring Plugins from the Percona Software Downloads directory, including our Apt and Yum repositories. For specific installation instructions, read the detailed documentation on each type of components below.
Nagios is the most widely-used open-source fault-detection system, with advanced features such as escalation, dependencies, and flexible notification rules.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 nagios/index
Cacti is a popular PHP- and MySQL-based web front-end to RRDTool, providing intuitive point-and-click configuration and browsing of graphs and metrics.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 cacti/index cacti/faq cacti/installing-templates cacti/customizing-templates cacti/mysql-templates cacti/galera-templates cacti/ssh-based-templates cacti/apache-templates cacti/jmx-templates cacti/linux-templates cacti/memcached-templates cacti/mongodb-templates cacti/nginx-templates cacti/openvz-templates cacti/redis-templates cacti/rds-templates cacti/developer-documentation cacti/hardening-cacti-setup cacti/upgrading-templates
Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 zabbix/index
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 changelog