PMM v2.32: Backup Management for MongoDB in GA, New Home Dashboard, and More!

November 15, 2022

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Dev Montiontactic

Insight for DBAs

Insight for Developers

Monitoring

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Percona Monitoring and Management v2.32 We are pleased to announce the general availability of the Backup Management for MongoDB and other improvements in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) v.2.32 that has been released in November 2022. Details are in this blog and also in the PMM 2.32 Release Notes.

PMM is now on the scene with a new Home Dashboard where you can quickly and easily check your databases’ health at one glance and detect anomalies. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, we created and released the new Home Dashboard to make it more user-friendly, even for users new to PMM.

You can get started using PMM in minutes with PMM Demo to check out the latest version of PMM V2.32.

Let’s have a look at the highlights of PMM 2.32:

General availability of Backup Management for MongoDB

The Backup Management for MongoDB in PMM has reached General Availability and is no longer in Technical Preview.

Supported setups

MongoDB Backup Management now supports replica set setups for the following actions:

Create logical snapshot backups

Create logical Point In Time Recovery (PITR) backups

Create physical snapshot backups. This is available only with Percona Server for MongoDB

Restore logical snapshot backups.

Restore physical backups. This requires additional manual operations after the restore and is only available with Percona Server for MongoDB.

Restore logical PITR backups from S3

Current limitations

Restoring logical PITR backups only supports S3 storage type

Restoring physical backups requires manual post-restore actions

Restoring a MongoDB backup on a new cluster is not yet supported

Restoring physical backups for containerized MongoDB setups is not supported

Local storage for MySQL is not supported

Sharded cluster setups are not supported

Backups that are stored locally cannot be removed automatically

Retention is not supported for PITR artifacts

Quicker and easier database health overview with the new Home Dashboard

As mentioned and promised in previous release notes, we were investigating better approaches, methods, and user-friendly presentation of database health in the Home Dashboard, which is also the entry point to PMM. Finally, we are proud to release this finalized dashboard as the new Home Dashboard. Thank you for your feedback and collaboration during all iterations of the experimental versions.

Monitor hundreds of nodes without any performance issues

If you have hundreds of nodes being monitored with the same PMM instance, the original dashboard may have taken a long time to load, which could have resulted in an unresponsive page, due to the design of the original Home Dashboard with repeating panels for each node. With performance issues in mind, we re-designed the Home Dashboard with new logic to show what is wrong or what is OK with your databases, instead of showing all metrics, for each node.

PMM Home Dashboard_home_select multiple nodes

Anomaly detection

Many of you probably use dozens of tools for different purposes in your daily work, meetings, and projects. These tools should make your life easier, not more intensive. With monitoring tools, the issue of too many metrics can be daunting— so analyzing data, and detecting anomalies that deviate from a database’s normal behavior should be easy and fast. Functional Anomaly Detection panels, as opposed to separate graphs for each node, are a much better way to visualize and recognize problems with your databases that may require action to be taken.

You can click the node name on the panel to see the Node Overview Dashboard of the related node if you see any anomaly. So you can see all metrics of the Node that you need to diagnose the problems.

All panels except Advisor Checks can be filtered by node and environment variables

Graphs in the Anomaly Detection row show the data for the top 20 nodes. e.g., CPU anomalies in the top 20

Command Center panels

The primary motivation behind the new Home Dashboard is simplicity. It was always hard to balance presenting the required metrics for everyone and at the same time, making it clean, functional, and simple while working on the new design. So we decided to use Command Center panels which are collapsed by default. If you see any anomaly in Memory Usage with more than 90%, how do you know when it happened or started? Time-series graphs for the Top 20 in the Command Center panels will help you see when the anomalies occurred: in the last 1 hour or the last week?

Enhanced main menu

We returned with two improvements we previously promised. These improvements were announced in V2.32 for easier access to dashboards from the Main Menu. After the last changes, with each possible monitored services type represented on the Main Menu as icons, the menu became crowded and extended with all icons representing different service types. In the latest version, you’ll only see the icons of currently monitored services on the Main Menu. For example, if you’re monitoring MongoDB, you will see the MongoDB Dashboard’s icon on the main menu, as opposed to the previous versions, which showed all database types PMM is capable of monitoring, whether you had them in your system or not. When and if you start to monitor other services like MySQL, they will be automatically added to the Main Menu.

Another improvement on the Main Menu is the visibility of all other dashboards. PMM provides multiple dashboards for different levels of information for each service. You only see some dashboards in the main menu; the rest are available in the folders. Some users can miss these dashboards, which are not presented in the Main Menu. Also, customer dashboards created by different users in your organization can be missed or invisible to you until you see them in the folders by chance. So, we added Other Dashboards links to the sub-menu of each service, so that you can easily click and see all dashboards in the Service folder.

Quick access to other dashboards from the menu

What’s next?

We’ll improve the Vacuum Dashboard with more metrics. If you’d like to enhance it with us, you can share your feedback in the comments.

A health dashboard for MySQL is on the way. Please share your suggestions in the comments or forum if you’d like to be part of the group shaping PMM.

We have started to work on two new and significant projects: High Availability in PMM and advanced Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). We’d love to hear your needs, use cases, and suggestions. You can quickly book a short call with the product team to collaborate with us.

For Backup Management, we are planning to continue to iterate on the current limitations listed above and make the restore processes as seamless as possible for all database types.