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How to Monitor MySQL Deployments With Prometheus and Grafana at ScaleGrid

Monitoring your MySQL database performance in real-time helps you immediately identify problems and other factors that could be causing issues now or in the future. It's also a good way to determine which components of the database can be enhanced or optimized to increase your efficiency and performance. This is usually done through monitoring software and tools either built-in to the database management software or installed from third-party providers.

Prometheus is an open-source software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It can be used along with a visualization tool like Grafana to easily create and edit dashboards, query, visualize, alert on, and understand your metrics. ScaleGrid provides full admin access to your MySQL deployments — this makes it easier to integrate the existing MySQL ecosystem of tools with your ScaleGrid MySQL deployments on AWS or Azure. Prometheus works well for recording any purely numeric time series, and also offers support for multi-dimensional data collection and querying. Grafana can be used with it to build dashboards that help visualize this data in a way that is easy to interpret and utilize.

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Chaos Engineering and Monitoring, Part 1: Sensu + Gremlin

One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We'd routinely generate alerts that weren't actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn't trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It's safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.

In an effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, I want to ensure that I have actionable alerts that are context heavy. Thankfully, there are a couple of tools that I've found go a long way in helping me with that effort: Sensu and Gremlin. I'll do an intro to those tools today, and we'll pick up on how these tools work together in the next post. It's worth mentioning that I am a Sensu employee.

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The Essential Elements of an Internet of Things Dashboard

In “What is an Internet of Things Dashboard?," we looked at an IoT Dashboard compared to a car dashboard. We summarized that an IoT dashboard provides performance information about IoT equipment in a graphical user interface accessible through an Internet browser or mobile app.

  • Real-time performance data
  • Alerts/warnings if there is a problem
  • Insights on performance over a time period
  • Analytics for problem-solving
  • Control for modifying performance

Today, companies are realizing that the ability to remotely monitor equipment with IoT dashboards will make them more efficient with their resources and provide more value to their customers. Now, the question is: how does an enterprise acquire this capability?