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Monitoring

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) provides an excellent solution to monitor Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL.

Note

Only PMM 2.x versions are supported by the Operator.

PMM is a client/server application. PMM Client runs on each node with the database you wish to monitor: it collects needed metrics and sends gathered data to PMM Server. As a user, you connect to PMM Server to see database metrics on a number of dashboards.

That’s why PMM Server and PMM Client need to be installed separately.

Installing the PMM Server

PMM Server runs as a Docker image, a virtual appliance, or on an AWS instance. Please refer to the official PMM documentation for the installation instructions.

Installing the PMM Client

The following steps are needed for the PMM client installation in your Kubernetes-based environment:

  1. The PMM client installation is initiated by updating the pmm section in the deploy/cr.yaml file.

    • set pmm.enabled=true
    • set the pmm.serverHost key to your PMM Server hostname or IP address (it should be resolvable and reachable from within your cluster)
    • check that the pmm.serverUser key contains your PMM Server user name (admin by default),
    • make sure the password key in the
      deploy/pmm-secret.yaml secrets file contains the password specified for the PMM Server during its installation.

    Apply changes with the kubectl apply -f deploy/pmm-secret.yaml command.

    Info

    You use deploy/pmm-secret.yaml file to create Secrets Object. The file contains all values for each key/value pair in a convenient plain text format. But the resulting Secrets contain passwords stored as base64-encoded strings. If you want to update password field, you’ll need to encode the value into base64 format. To do this, you can run echo -n "password" | base64 --wrap=0 (or just echo -n "password" | base64 in case of Apple macOS) in your local shell to get valid values. For example, setting the PMM Server user’s password to new_password in the cluster1-pmm-secret object can be done with the following command:

    $ kubectl patch secret/cluster1-pmm-secret -p '{"data":{"password": '$(echo -n new_password | base64 --wrap=0)'}}'
    
    $ kubectl patch secret/cluster1-pmm-secret -p '{"data":{"password": '$(echo -n new_password | base64)'}}'
    

    When done, apply the edited deploy/cr.yaml file:

    $ kubectl apply -f deploy/cr.yaml
    
  2. Check that corresponding Pods are not in a cycle of stopping and restarting. This cycle occurs if there are errors on the previous steps:

    $ kubectl get pods
    $ kubectl logs cluster1-7b7f7898d5-7f5pz -c pmm-client
    
  3. Now you can access PMM via https in a web browser, with the login/password authentication, and the browser is configured to show Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL metrics.

Get expert help

If you need assistance, visit the community forum for comprehensive and free database knowledge, or contact our Percona Database Experts for professional support and services. Join K8S Squad to benefit from early access to features and “ask me anything” sessions with the Experts.