Founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses, Yelp has some 135 million monthly unique visitors. With those traffic volumes Yelp’s 300+ engineers are constantly working to keep things moving smoothly – and when you move that fast you learn many things.

Fortunately for the global MySQL community, three Yelp DBAs will be sharing what they’ve learned at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this April 13-16 in Santa Clara, California.

Say “hello” to Susanne Lehmann, Jenni Snyder and Josh Snyder! I chatted with them over email about their presentations, on how MySQL is used at Yelp, and about the shortage of women in MySQL.

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Tom: Jenni, you and Josh will be co-presenting “ …

This post is a follow-up to my November 19 webinar, “Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Preventing Downtime for the Over-Extended DBA,” during which I described some of the most common reasons DBAs experience avoidable downtime. The session was aimed at the “over-stretched DBA,” identified as the MySQL DBA short of time or an engineer of another discipline without the depth of the MySQL system. The over-stretched DBA may be prone to making fundamental mistakes that cause downtime through poor response time, operations that cause blocking on important data or administrative mishaps through the lack of best practice monitoring and alerting. (You can download my slides and view the recorded webinar here.)

Monitor the things
One of the aides to keeping the system up and …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

I was talking with a Percona Support customer earlier this week who was looking for Galera data on Percona Cloud Tools. (Percona Cloud Tools, now in free beta, is a hosted service providing access to query performance insights for all MySQL uses.)

The customer mentioned they were already keeping track of some Galera stats on Cacti, and given they were inclined to use Percona Cloud Tools more and more, they wanted to know if it was already supporting Percona XtraDB Cluster. My answer was: “No, not yet: you can install agents in each node (the regular way in the first node, then …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.1.3.

Changelog:

* Introduced more secure location of PHP script configs to harden a Cacti setup
* Addressed CVE-2014-2569

We have introduced a more secure location /etc/cacti/ for PHP script configs. Earlier, the only way was to keep .php.cnf configs inside of scripts/ folder which falls under the web directory of Cacti setup, thus provides a potential security vulnerability. We strongly recommend to move all .php.cnf files from /usr/share/cacti/scripts/ to /etc/cacti/ and also harden your Cacti setup.

A new tarball is available from …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.1.2.

Changelog:

* Added Nagios plugin and Cacti template for Amazon RDS
* Added Nagios config template to the documentation
* Added an option to pmp-check-pt-table-checksum to check MAX(ts) of latest checksum
* Added generic Nagios plugin for PT tables
* Extended pmp-check-mysql-processlist with max user connections check
* Zabbix MySQL.running-slave item failed with MySQL 5.6 (bug 1272358)
* ss_get_mysql_stats and MariaDB does not use have_response_time_distribution (bug 1285888)
* Cacti Monitoring plugins and SNMP via TCP (bug 1268552)

Shortly about the new features.

Amazon RDS support in Nagios and Cacti.
We have created the Nagios plugin and Cacti template to give you a chance to add …

Now it’s time to setup proper monitoring to avoid unpleasant surprises in future.

There are two major problems the monitoring solves: alerting and trending. Alerting is to notify a responsible person about some major event like service stopped working. Trending is to track the change of something over time – disk or memory usage over time, replication lag etc.

This post will be about alerting with Nagios.

The major problem with most of Nagios setups I’ve seen is excessive amount of false positives. This kills whole idea of monitoring. The matter is when an admin gets a false alert they tend to mute it, explicitly or implicitly. They either filter alerts out or don’t treat them seriously. In general case the alert must be worth to wake up the admin in the middle of the night. If the alert isn’t worth as much the real problem will be ignored sooner or …

Percona announces the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.1.1 to address the critical bug that appears after the 1.1 upgrade.

Changelog:

* Cacti mysql graphs stop working with data input field “server-id” after 1.1 upgrade (bug 1264814)
* Non-integer poller errors for MySQL Query Response Time (bug 1264353)

A new tarball is available from downloads area or RPM and DEB packages from our software repositories. The plugins are fully supported for customers with a Percona Support contract and free installation services are provided as part of some contracts. In addition as part of …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.1. 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.

In this release we have added MySQL template for Zabbix 2.0.x adopted from the existing Cacti one.

Changelog:

* Added MySQL template for Zabbix 2.0.x (first release)
* Added FreeBSD support to Nagios plugins, partially rewritten pmp-check-unix-memory (bugs 1249575, 1244081)
* Added new options to ss_get_mysql_stats.php to better support pt-heartbeat (bugs 1253125, 1253130)
* ss_get_mysql_stats.php script was opening multiple connections to the server …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Monitoring Plugins 1.0.5 for MySQL. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios and Cacti, and are delivered in the form of templates, plugins, and scripts.

Changelog:

* Added mysql-ca option to ss_get_mysql_stats.php (bug 1213857)
* Added user info to the idle_blocker_duration check of pmp-check-mysql-innodb (bug 1215317)
* Extended pmp-check-mysql-processlist with more locking states (bug 1213859)
* ss_get_mysql_stats.php did not work with custom mysql port (bug 1213862)
* ss_get_mysql_stats.php silently failed when a query returns too many rows (bug 1225070)
* Wrong description of percona-cacti-templates deb package (bug 1217782)

A new tarball is available from …