PMM for PostgreSQL: Quick Start Guide

August 30, 2019

Author

Stephen Thorn

Monitoring

Percona Software

PostgreSQL

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As a Solutions Engineer at Percona, one of my responsibilities is to support our customer-facing roles such as the sales and customer success teams. This affords me the opportunity to speak to many current and new customers who partner with Percona. I often find that many people are interested in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) as a free and open-source monitoring solution due to its robust monitoring capabilities when compared to many SaaS-based monitoring solutions. They are interested in installing PMM for PostgreSQL for the first time and want a “quick start guide” with a brief overview to get their feet wet. I have included the commands to get started for both PMM 1 and PMM 2 (PMM2 is still in beta).

For a brief overview of the PMM Architecture and how to install PMM Server, please see my previous post PMM for MongoDB: Quick Start Guide.

PMM for PostgreSQL

Demonstration Environment

When deploying PMM in this example, I am making the following assumptions about the environment:

PostgreSQL and the monitoring host are running on Debian based operating systems. (For information on installing as an RPM instead please read Deploying Percona Monitoring and Management.)

PostgreSQL is already installed and setup. The username and password for the PostgreSQL user are postgres:postgres.

The PMM server docker image has been installed and started on another host.

Installing PMM for PostgreSQL

Setting up DB permissions

Capturing read and write time statistics is possible only if PostgreSQL’s track_io_timing setting is enabled. This can be done either in the configuration file or with the following query executed on the running system:

ALTER SYSTEM SET track_io_timing=ON;<br>SELECT pg_reload_conf();

1	ALTER SYSTEM SET track_io_timing=ON;<br>SELECT pg_reload_conf();

Percona recommends that a PostgreSQL user be configured for SUPERUSER level access, in order to gather the maximum amount of data with a minimum amount of complexity. This can be done with the following command for the standalone PostgreSQL installation:

CREATE USER postgres WITH SUPERUSER ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'postgres';

1	CREATE USER postgres WITH SUPERUSER ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'postgres';

If you are using RDS:

CREATE USER postgres WITH rds_superuser ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'postgres';

1	CREATE USER postgres WITH rds_superuser ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'postgres';

Download the Percona repo package

We must first enable the Percona package repository on our PostgreSQL instance and install the PMM Client. Please refer to PMM for MongoDB: Quick Start Guide to accomplish the first three steps below (but come back here before doing MongoDB-specific things)

Download PMM-Client

Install PMM-Client

Configure PMM-Client for monitoring

Now we provide the PMM Client credentials necessary for monitoring the PostgreSQL database. Execute the following command to start monitoring and communicating with the PMM server:

sudo pmm-admin add postgresql --user=postgres --password=postgres

1	sudo pmm-admin add postgresql --user=postgres --password=postgres

To start monitoring and communicating with the PMM 2 Server:

pmm-admin add postgresql --username=postgres --password=postgres

1	pmm-admin add postgresql --username=postgres --password=postgres

You should get a similar output as below if it was successful:

Great! We have successfully installed PMM for PostgreSQL and are ready to take a look at the dashboard.

Of Note: We’re launching PMM 2 Beta with just the PostgreSQL Overview dashboard, but we have others under development, so watch for new Dashboards to appear in subsequent releases!