Are you using MySQL database in your application? You can use CopperEgg to monitor your MySQL database performance. As an illustration, you can configure and receive alerts for the following scenarios:

  • Performance: alert if the MySQL performance is poor.
  • If the slow_queries value is significantly above its normal range, that would imply that the MySQL server is under heavy load.
  • Bytes_received and bytes_written values track the read-write performance of the MySQL database.

Prerequisites

CopperEgg offers a SAAS based out-of-the-box monitoring solution for MySQL that is easy to set up. If you are not familiar with the concept of custom metrics as used in CopperEgg, please go through Custom Metrics information once before continuing with this document.

  1. CopperEgg account.

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  1. MySQL up and running in your environment (this can be on your own server or using Amazon Web Services’ RDS.)
  2. Root access to server to install the MySQL agent.

Monitor MySQL using out-of-the-box custom metrics installer from CopperEgg

There are three steps that you need to do to start monitoring a MySQL server:

  1. MySQL Agent Installation
  2. Verify that your MySQL Dashboard is up and running
  3. Configure alerts to be notified about MySQL performance issues

1.MySQL Agent Installation

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Figure 1: In your CopperEgg Account, navigate to Databases>Getting Started

Login to your CopperEgg account and navigate to Custom tab -> Getting Started. Click on MySQL icon.  image3.png.

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Figure 2: The MySQL agent installation script

Click on image5.png icon to copy the installer script to your clipboard. Paste the command into the terminal window on the server where you want to install the agent.  Script can be run on the server running MySQL, or it can be a different server, but this server will need to be continually running in order to monitor MySQL.  (If you’re using AWS RDS and you don’t have direct server access to the RDS you’ll need to use a different EC2 instance.  Make sure your security groups and any other networking configuration are setup to allow this server to access RDS.)

As soon as the script is run on a terminal with root access, it starts downloading the required MySQL monitoring agent on your server. You will need to configure the following items in the agent installation process. Item specified in square brackets ( [ ] ) are the default.

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Figure 3: Executing the MySQL agent installation script

1. Press y to monitor MySQL.

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Figure 4: Executing the MySQL agent installation script with user as copperegg, Group as copperegg and monitoring frequency as 15 seconds

2. Monitoring frequency: 15, [60], 300, 900, 3600 seconds

3. User and Group for running service as default values: [copperegg][copperegg]

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Figure 5: Executing the MySQL agent installation script with group name as “MySQL”, group label as “MySQL Metrics” and Dashboard  as “MySQL”

4. Group label, group name and dashboard name for custom metrics [MySQL][MySQL Metrics][MySQL]

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Figure 6: Executing the MySQL agent installation script with unique id, server hostname , username, password and database. Only one MySQL server is added for monitoring.

5. Unique name for this node (good to differentiate if you are monitoring different MySQL databases). [<user>-MySQL]

6. Server details : hostname username,password and database for service. [localhost][user][password][database_name]

7. After configuring one database, you’ll get an option to add more MySQL databases.

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Figure 7: Executing the MySQL agent installation script with an upstart init file and the default value for log file name. The installation completes successfully!

8. Configure log file name and upstart job name (defaults present) [/usr/local/copperegg/log/copperegg-metrics.log][/etc/init/copperegg-metrics.conf]

2.Verify that your MySQL Dashboard is up and running

Navigate to Dashboard and you will see a new MySQL Dashboard has been added automatically by the installer.

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Figure 8: A new Dashboard for MySQL has been added

As the installed script executes, you will notice data samples appearing on the widgets for this Dashboard.

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Figure 9: Widget inside MySQL Dashboard displaying Threads connected.

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Figure 10: Widget inside MySQL Dashboard displaying count of queries.

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Figure 11: Widget inside MySQL Dashboard displaying count of slow queries.

Monitored metrics

CopperEgg currently monitors 10 metrics which cover most of the important metrics for MySQL from a performance and stability perspective. You can see these 10 metrics by navigating to the Custom Tab > Custom Objects and selecting Details on the Custom Metrics Group Label [MySQL Metrics] that was given as installation input. For some of these metrics, alerts have been automatically created (see section 3 below). To create new alerts see section: Configuring your own Alerts for MySQL Database.

The metrics are:

  • threads_connected : Threads connected (alerts automatically created)
  • created_tmp_disk_tables : Created tmp disk tables
  • qcache_hits : Qcache hits
  • queries : Queries
  • slow_queries : Slow queries (alerts automatically created)
  • bytes_received : Bytes received
  • bytes_sent : Bytes sent
  • com_insert : Com insert
  • com_select : Com select
  • com_update : Com update

3.Configure Alerts to be notified about MySQL performance issues

Default Pre-Configured Alerts for the MySQL Database

As soon as your MySQL Database Monitoring Dashboard comes up, you will notice that some alert configurations have been automatically created by our Installation Script (under Alerts > Configure Alerts). These pre-configured alerts for MySQL Database include:

Sr. No. Metric Name Definition Alert Definitions Duration
1 Threads connected The number of currently open connections Alert will be triggered if open connections are more than 800. 3 Min
2 Slow Queries The rate of slow queries  Alert will trigger for all slow queries. 3 Min

If the alerting condition is met for these pre-configured alerts, some alert notifications may also be triggered.

Configuring your own Alerts for the MySQL Database

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Figure 12: A new alert being added that will be triggered when MySQL slow queries metric exceeds a threshold of <entered value> within a time period of 1 min

In addition to the default pre-configured alerts that are created by the Installer, alerts can also be configured against any of these 10 monitored metrics for MySQL.

You can configure new alerts that will be triggered when performance issues with MySQL arise. You can also configure the notification mechanisms for a triggered alert.

  1. Go to Alerts Tab > Configure alerts and click on “New Alerts” button
  2. Provide values for these fields in the New Alert page:
  • Description: A description of the alert that will be easily recognized by you and your team if the alert is triggered
  • Alert me when: Select the metric of interest and the condition upon which the alert is triggered. In the Alert me when dropdown, you can prefill “Custom: <your MySQL Metric Group>” to get only the list of monitored metrics for your specific MySQL database. From this list, you can then select the specific metric for which you want to configure an alert. As an illustration, in Figure 12, the chosen metric of interest in ‘Alert me when’ is ‘Custom: MySQL Metrics: Slow Queries’  and the condition for triggering the alert is if the average value is more than <entered value from dropdown>.
  • For at least: The duration for which the alert condition must be valid for the alert to be triggered
  • Matching tags: By default, (match everything) is chosen. If needed, you can attach tags to a particular metric object and select those tags here, which would cause only alerts on that metric object to be triggered.
  • Excluding tags: By default, (exclude nothing) is chosen. If needed, you can attach tags to a particular metric object and select those tags here, which would cause alerts on that metric object to be skipped.
  • Annotate: When enabled, an annotation is automatically created when the alert is triggered. Annotations will be visible in the custom metrics dashboard where the data stream is displayed.
  • Automatic Clear: When enabled, the alert issue is automatically cleared if the triggering condition is no longer true
  • Notify on clear: When enabled, notifications are also sent when the alert issue is cleared. Please do note that notifications are always sent when the alert issue is triggered.
  • Send Notifications To: Here you can configure the notification mechanisms by which the alert is communicated to you and others in your team.

CopperEgg supports notifying different sets of users with differing notification mechanisms for each alert type.

Notification mechanisms include:

  • Email
  • SMS
  • PagerDuty
  • Twitter
  • HipChat
  • Campfire
  • Slack
  • OpsGenie

Webhooks are also exposed for clients to configure custom notification mechanisms.

More about setting up website probe alerts can be found here.

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