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I am a big fan of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) and am happy to report that setting up Percona Platform is as easy to set up and offers a lot of value. Percona Platform reached GA status recently and I think you will find it a handy addition to your infrastructure.
What is Percona Platform?
Percona Platform brings together enterprise-level distributions of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB plus it includes a range of open source tools for data backup, availability, and management. The core is PMM which provides database management, monitoring, and automated insights, making it easier to manage database deployments. The number of sites with more than 100 separate databases has grown rapidly in the past few years. Being able to have command and control of that many instances from a CLI has become impossible. Businesses need to move faster in increasingly complex environments which puts ever-increasing pressure on database administrators, developers, and everyone involved in database operations. The spiraling levels of demand make it harder to support, manage, and correct issues in database environments.
What Percona Platform provides is a unified view of the health of your entire database environment to quickly visually identify and remediate issues. Developers can now self-service many of their database demands quickly and efficiently so they can easily provision and manage databases on a self-service basis across test and production instances. So you spend fewer resources and time on the management of database complexity.
The two keys to Percona Platform are Query Analytics (QAN), which provides granular insights into database behavior and helps uncover new database performance patterns for in-depth troubleshooting and performance optimization, and Percona Advisors, which are automated insights, created by Percona Experts to identify important issues for remediation such as security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, performance problems, policy compliance, and database design issues. Automated insights within Percona Monitoring and Management ensure your database performs at its best. The Advisors check for replication inconsistencies, durability issues, password-less users, insecure connections, unstable OS configuration, and search for available performance improvements among other functions.
Percona Platform is a point of control for your database infrastructure and augments PMM to be even more intelligent when connected to the Percona Platform. By connecting PMM with the Percona Platform, you get more advanced Advisors, centralized user account management, access to support tickets, private Database as a Service, Percona Expertise with the fastest SLAs, and more.
So How Do I Install Percona Platform?
The first step is to install PMM by following the Quick Start Guide. You need version 2.2.7 or later.
Second, You will need a Percona Account.
Third, you will need to connect that account to PMM.
I will assume that you will already have PMM installed. Did I mention that PMM is free, open source software?
The signup form allows you to create a new account or use an existing account.
Now you can create a name for your organization.
After creating your username and password, create your organization
Now login to your PMM dashboard and select the Settings / Percona Platform. You will need to get your ‘Public Address’ which the browser can populate the value for you if need be.
The PMM Server ID is automatically generated by PMM. You will need to provide a name for your server, and you will need a second browser window to login into Percona Platform to get the Percona Platform Access Token (this token has a thirty-minute lifetime, so be quick or regenerate another token).
Go back into PMM, paste the Access Token into the Percona Platform Access Token field, and click Connect.
On the Percona Platform page, you will see your PMM instances. Congratulations, you are using Percona Platform!
Advisor Checks
All checks are hosted on Percona Platform. PMM Server automatically downloads them from here when the Advisors and Telemetry options are enabled in PMM under Configuration > Settings > Advanced Settings. Both options are enabled by default.
Depending on the entitlements available for your Percona Account, the set of advisor checks that PMM can download from Percona Platform differ in terms of complexity and functionality.
If your PMM instance is not connected to Percona Platform, PMM can only download the basic set of Anonymous advisor checks. As soon as you connect your PMM instance to Percona Platform, has access to additional checks, available only for Registered PMM instances.
If you are a Percona customer with a Percona Customer Portal account, you also get access to Paid checks, which offer more advanced database health information. A list is provided below.
| Check Name | Description | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| MongoDB Active vs Available Connections | Checks the ratio between Active and Available connections. | Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Authentication | Warns if MongoDB authentication is disabled. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Security AuthMech | Warns if MongoDB is not using the default SHA-256 hashing as SCRAM authentication method. | Paid |
| MongoDB IP Bindings | Warns if MongoDB network binding is not set as recommended. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB CVE Version | Shows an error if MongoDB or Percona Server for MongoDB version is not the latest one with CVE fixes. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Journal Check | Warns if journal is disabled. | Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Localhost Authentication Bypass is Enabled | Warns if MongoDB localhost bypass is enabled. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Non-Default Log Level | Warns if MongoDB is not using the default log level. | Paid |
| MongoDB Profiling Level | Warns when the MongoDB profile level is set to collect data for all operations. | Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Read Tickets | Warns if MongoDB is using more than 128 read tickets. | Paid |
| MongoDB Replica Set Topology | Warns if the Replica Set cluster has less than three members. | Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Version | Warns if MongoDB or Percona Server for MongoDB version is not the latest one. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MongoDB Write Tickets | Warns if MongoDB network is using more than 128 write tickets. | Paid |
| Check if Binaries are 32-bits | Notifies if version_compatible_machine equals i686. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| MySQL Automatic User Expired Password | Notifies if version_compatible_machine equals i686. | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL InnoDB flush method and File Format check | Checks the following settings: innodb_file_format, innodb_file_format_max, innodb_flush_method and innodb_data_file_path | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL Checks based on values of MySQL configuration variables | Checks the following settings: innodb_file_format,innodb_file_format_max,innodb_flush_method and innodb_data_file_path. | Paid |
| MySQL Binary Logs checks, Local infile and SQL Mode checks | Warns about non-optimal settings for Binary Log, Local Infile and SQL mode. | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL Configuration Check | Warns if parameters are not following Percona best practices, for infile, replication threads, and replica checksum. | Paid |
| MySQL Users With Granted Public Networks Access | Notifies about MySQL accounts allowed to be connected from public networks. | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL User Check | Runs a high-level check on user setup | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL Advanced User Check | Runs a detailed check on user setup | Paid |
| MySQL Security Check | Runs a detailed check on user setup | Paid |
| MySQL Test Database | This check returns a notice if there is a database with name ‘test’ or ‘test_%’. | Registered, Paid |
| MySQL Version | Warns if MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL, or MariaDB version is not the latest one. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| PostgreSQL Archiver is Failing | Verifies if the archiver has failed. | Paid |
| PostgreSQL Cache Hit Ratio | Checks database hit ratio and complains when this is too low. | Paid |
| PostgreSQL Configuration Change Requires Restart/Reload | Warns when a configuration was changed and requires a server restart/reload | Registered, Paid |
| PostgreSQL fsync is Disabled | Shows an error if the fsync configuration is disabled, as this can result in unrecoverable data corruption. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| PostgreSQL Autovacuum Logging Is Disabled | Shows an error if the fsync configuration is disabled, as this can result in unrecoverable data corruption. | Paid |
| PostgreSQL Checkpoints Logging Is Disabled | Notifies if the log_checkpoints configuration option is not enabled. | Paid |
| PostgreSQL Max_connections is too high | Notifies if the max_connections setting is set above 300. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| PostgreSQL Stale Replication Slot | Warns for stale replication slots since these can lead to WAL file accumulation and DB server outage. | Paid |
| PostgreSQL Super Role | Notifies if there are users with superuser privileges. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
| PostgreSQL Version Check | Warns if the PostgreSQL minor or major versions are not the latest, and shows an error if the major version is 9.4 or older. | Anonymous, Registered, Paid |
More Advisors will be added and Perona always welcomes contributions. Check out Percona Platform today!
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