Here is a small HowTo about installing the Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) server using the AWS Marketplace.

Requirements:

• AWS account
• Web-browser with enabled JavaScript
• Cup of coffee

For the first you need to open the AWS Marketplace page and search for “Percona Monitoring and Management Server” or just click to this direct link.

Here you click to Continue to Subscribe and you’ll be redirected to the Subscribe to this software page. On this page you may look at details about your subscription, additional taxes and etcetera.

Let’s click Continue to Configuration.

On the next page, called Configure this software you need to choose the version of PMM and region, then click Continue to Launch button.

On the Launch this software page you need to choose:

• Choose action: Launch from website
• EC2 Instance Type: Any type of instance that suits your needs, t2.medium will be used in this example

Scroll down to the VPC Settings block, here you can set:

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – If not exists, then need to create a new one
• Subnet – For communication between instances in VPC
• Security group – In settings of selected security group an Inbound and Outbound rules should have permissions for connection through SSH, HTTP and HTTPS protocols form any IP-addresses
• Key pair – Need to create a new one if not exists

Click the Launch button when you are ready.

If everything is okay you’ll see a page like above, to check the initialization status go to the page EC2 Console.

From the Instances page you may copy an IP-address of the instance and connect to it via web-browser, ignore Self-Signed Certificate warning.

Here for login you need to input the ID of the instance from AWS Console, copy and paste it.

After that, the web-browser redirects you to the final setup page.

Here you need input username and password.

• Default username: admin
• Default password: admin

On the next step you may have to reset the default password or skip this step.

And we are finally in, congrats!

Setting up open-source DB monitoring using PMM

There are plenty of proprietary DB monitoring services, but did you know there is a great open-source alternative – Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)? PMM provides monitoring, alerts, and query analysis for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and others. The package is open source, has a large community, and can be set up in minutes.

What do you get once the Percona PMM is set up?

There are 3 main features of Percona Monitoring and Management: monitoring, alerts, and query analytics.

Monitoring

Once you complete the PMM setup, you already have plenty of preset Grafana-based dashboards. These dashboards display the info about:

• Your host machine
  • CPU load
  • RAM usage
  • Network usage
  • Disk usage
  • Disk space forecast
  • Uptime
  • Etc.
• Your database
  • Connections
  • Queries Per Second
  • Uptime
  • Etc.

These default dashboards are already customisable dashboards that help you keep an eye on the infrastructure.

Alerts

Real-time alerts notify you if something goes wrong.

Query analysis

PMM helps you with troubleshooting by providing data from a high-level overview to query-level analytics.

5 Steps To Set Up DB Monitoring With PMM

The PMM consists of 2 parts:

• Client (Agent)
• Server

PMM Agent should be installed on your database host machine. It will be collecting telemetry data about the host machine and database(s) and sending it to the PMM Server.

Unlike most cloud-based monitoring services, the PMM Server is a part you should also care about. It will store and process all the telemetry data received from agents, and provide UI for analysis.

There are 5 steps to set up PMM for DB monitoring:

1. Set up a PMM Server
2. Set up a PMM Agent
3. Connect the Agent to the Server
4. Connect DB to the Agent
5. Customise Dashboards and Alerts

Let’s look into the details of each step.

1. Set up a PMM Server

You can get a fully managed PMM Server at hostedpmm.com in several clicks or deploy it by yourself.

If you want to host a PMM server by yourself, you need a VPS that meets PMM Server requirements. It will be processing all the telemetry data from your infrastructure, so it needs up to 2 GB per monitored DB. The PMM Server will also be storing all the telemetry data for some time. It requires around 1 GB of storage per monitored database per week.

Once you have a VPS, you can install PMM Server. For example, you can use an easy-install script by running

wget -O - <https://www.percona.com/get/pmm> | /bin/bash

This script:

• Installs Docker if it is not already installed on your system.
• Stops and backs up any PMM Server Docker containers that are currently running.
• Pulls and runs the latest PMM Server Docker image.

After the deployment, you need to properly set up your network. If everything is correct you can access the PMM Server web interface.

Use admin/admin to log in.

As you can see, it already shows the info about the PMM Server host machine and its DB. Your PMM server is set up and works properly.

2. Set up a PMM Agent

You need ssh access to your DB host machine.

There are several ways to set up a PMM server:

1. Docker
2. Package manager
3. Binary package

Not everyone wants to set up docker to their DB host machine just for monitoring. The binary package is hard to update compared to the package manager way to install. So we advise using package manager installation.

To do this you need to run these commands:

Debian-based

wget <https://repo.percona.com/apt/percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb> dpkg -i percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb apt update apt install -y pmm2-client

Red Hat-based

yum install -y <https://repo.percona.com/yum/percona-release-latest.noarch.rpm> yum install -y pmm2-client

In most cases, there should not be any problems. At this point, the PMM Agent is set up and we need to connect it to the PMM Server.

3. Connect the Agent to the Server

Run one command:

pmm-admin config --server-insecure-tls --server-url=https://admin:admin@X.X.X.X:443

The better way to authorise the agent is to create a token via UI and run this command instead:

pmm-admin config --server-insecure-tls --server-url=https://api_key:token@X.X.X.X:443

An option –server-insecure-tls should be used if you haven’t installed SSL certificates to the PMM Server.

💡 This process might be tricky but is recommended for security reasons. You can avoid this routine by getting a fully managed PMM server at hostedpmm.com. There you can get SSL ready PMM server in a few clicks.

After connecting the PMM agent to the PMM Server, you are already able to see your host machine metrics.

But as you can see, there is N/A for all the DB-related metrics. So we need to connect DB to the agent.

4. Connect DB to the Agent

It is good practice to create a dedicated non-superuser account to connect the database instance to PMM Agent. E.g. user with name pmm, password pass, and the necessary permissions.

Connecting your DB to the PMM Agent depends on your DB. Basically, you need to run a command in DB. For example, MySQL commands look like this:

CREATE USER 'pmm'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass' WITH MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 10;
GRANT SELECT, PROCESS, REPLICATION CLIENT, RELOAD, BACKUP_ADMIN ON *.* TO 'pmm'@'localhost';

Then you should add a service using PMM Server UI

After that, you should be able to see DB metrics in your PMM Server web UI.

The basic DB monitoring setup is done! We can improve it by customising PMM for your needs.

5. Customise Dashboards and Alerts

There are a lot of preset dashboards but you can customize them for your tasks and workflows.

E.g. if you want an alert for some condition, you can easily set it up.

That’s it! 🎉

Now you have great monitoring for your infrastructure setup. You can keep an eye on a load, check drive usage forecast, and scale in advance. Get alerts if something goes wrong and increase the availability of your service. Use query analysis to find out which requests need to be optimised and improve your service responsiveness.The easiest way to get PMM Server for DB monitoring is HostedPMM.

The easiest way to get PMM Server for DB monitoring is HostedPMM.

Get a Hosted PMM Server and Receive a $200 Bonus

The easiest way to get a PMM Server is hostedpmm.com. It takes several clicks and a couple of minutes.

Everyone who signs up through December 31 will receive a $200 bonus credit.

Sign Up For Free

Get open source PMM up and ready for monitoring your databases in a few clicks.

We are excited to announce the launch of the HostedPMM beta release! Hosted PMM is a service that allows you easily spin up a fully managed PMM server for monitoring databases in minutes.

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is an open-source database monitoring package loved by app developers and database administrators. PMM enables database performance monitoring, query analysis, real-time alerting, and much more! However, setting up PMM may be a complex process that involves deployment, network configuration, installing SSL certificates, and connecting agents. Managing PMM may also become a time-consuming distraction requiring specific skills.

HostedPMM removes all this trouble, by providing a ready-to-use PMM server, a perfect solution for database monitoring and query analysis. HostedPMM automates the following operations for each user:

• Spawn a virtual machine
• Deploy a PMM server to it
• Perform initial configuration
• Set up DNS and SSL for a custom domain

With HostedPMM you get a fully-functional PMM server in minutes!

PMM is a great open-source solution to find and resolve database issues. But it is a bit complicated to set up and support so we decided to make these processes as easy as possible. I believe that HostedPMM will help you spend more time on the product, not infrastructure.

Sergei Krupnik, HostedPMM Product Owner.

After you start a PMM server with HostedPMM can rely on us continuously taking care of it, including:

• PMM server availability
• Security updates
• Infrastructure scaling
• Telemetry data backups

Moreover, HostedPMM users can contact our team for support and assistance to get the most out of PMM using best practice methods for database monitoring.

We need to monitor several high-load MySQL database clusters. Previously we used a self-hosted PMM server and had to do a lot of work that seemed to be unnecessary. We were paying for VPS, kept eye on backups, and even had to monitor our monitoring system. That is ridiculous.

It is great that now we basically can outsource PMM hosting, monitoring, scaling, and support. HostedPMM just works and we are not bothered with these routines anymore.

Valery Panov, Head of Infrastructure team at Ivinco.

We invite everyone to try the HostingPMM beta for free. No credit card is required to sign up and start using the service.

We encourage you to give us feedback via Twitter, Facebook, or email at info@hostedpmm.com. You can also reach Sergei Krupnik (HostedPMM Product Owner) directly at sergei.krupnik@hostedpmm.com.