Application events are one of the contributors to changes in database performance characteristics, and in this release PMM now supports receiving events and displaying them as Annotations using the new command pmm-admin annotate. A recent Percona survey reveals that Database and DevOps Engineers highly value visibility into the Application layer.  By displaying Application Events on top of your PMM graphs, Engineers can now correlate Application Events (common cases: Application Deploys, Outages, and Upgrades) against Database and System level metric changes.

Usage

For example, you have just completed an Application deployment to version 1.2, which is relevant to UI only, so you want to set tags for the version and interface impacted:

Using the optional --tags allows you to filter which Annotations are displayed on the dashboard via a toggle option.  Read more about Annotations utilization in the Documentation.

Grafana 5.0

We’re extremely pleased to see Grafana ship 5.0 and we were fortunate enough to be at Grafanacon, including Percona’s very own Dimitri Vanoverbeke (Dim0) who presented What we Learned Integrating Grafana and Prometheus!

Included in Grafana 5.0 are a number of dramatic improvements, which in future Percona Monitoring and Management releases we plan to extend our usage of each feature, and the one we like best is the virtually unlimited way you can size and shape graphs.  No longer are you bound by panel constraints to keep all objects at the same fixed height!  This improvement indirectly addresses the visualization error in PMM Server where some graphs would appear to be on two lines and ended up wasting screen space.

Switching between Dashboards

PMM now allows you to navigate between dashboards while maintaining the same host under observation, so that for example you can start on MySQL Overview looking at host serverA, switch to MySQL InnoDB Advanced dashboard and continue looking at serverA, thus saving you a few clicks in the interface.

New Percona XtraDB Cluster Galera Replication Latency Graphs

We have added new Percona XtraDB Cluster Replication Latency graphs on our Percona XtraDB Cluster Galera Cluster Overview dashboard so that you can compare latency across all members in a cluster in one view.