Percona Cloud Tools January 2014 status update

Percona Cloud Tools, a new service currently in beta, applies Percona’s MySQL expertise to identify the best opportunities for application performance improvement.

The first component of Percona Cloud Tools that’s now available is Query Analytics. Based on pt-query-digest, Query Analytics enables DBAs and application developers to analyze MySQL queries over long periods of time and shines a spotlight on problems. One could say it’s “continuous slow log analysis through the web… as-a-Service” but that would be quite a long acronym. Percona Cloud Tools can help you:

• Ensure queries perform well and with expected response times
• Find and analyze the slowest, most problematic queries
• Measure gains in query performance after implementing changes
• Get low level metrics details and other data for each query

Join the other testers that are improving the performance of their applications and sign up for the beta today. Of course, it’s free.
Even with the December holidays the Percona Cloud Tools team was hard at work. Here are some of the ways we’ve recently improved the service.

New Features
Evolving over many months, we are now introducing a refined Query Analytics user experience to efficiently analyze MySQL query metrics. This is made of up three primary views.

• Performance – The Performance view delivers at-a-glance metrics about MySQL performance. These include Queries Per Second (QPS), load, 95% response time, and others. Like the dashboard of a car, this data is vital but minimal. It’s useful when everything should be ok and you’re just taking a quick look to make sure that nothing has hit a wall.
• Historical – The Historical view looks at the bigger picture and is one of the ways that Percona Cloud Tools is quite unique. It’s the history of metrics data and is very useful for trending, spotting problems, and seeing if changes in the past helped or hurt query performance. For example, not only can you view the most recent Query Response Time values but you can also view values over the past weeks.
• Report – The Report view delivers “the facts” about actual queries and is easily accessible from the Performance and Historical views. Just move your mouse over a server name anywhere in the application to see a query report. For example, if your Performance view shows that MySQL is having problems, getting to the Report view to see the bad queries is simple and fast.

So not only are we making users lives easier through better data organization, the new Percona Cloud Tools use experience enables you to quickly navigate to the specifics of any problem.

Bugs Fixed
Not only have we rolled out a new user experience, we’ve also addressed some bugs along the way.

• An existing agent could fail to start, receiving a 500 error from the API.
• Max values were shown for aggregated “QPS” and “Total” periods instead of average for “QPS” and sum for “Total”.
• pt-agent would not apply new MySQL connection options without restarting

Thank you to all of our beta testers for using Percona Cloud Tools and providing feedback. Your suggestions and bug reports have been very helpful.

Try Percona Cloud Tools for free while it’s still in beta.  You’ll be up and running minutes! Having troubles setting up the service? We’re here to help. Follow the “Feedback” link after you sign in and tell us about the problem.

Finally, on February 12th, Vadim Tkachenko (CTO of Percona) will show you how to Analyze MySQL Query Performance with Percona Cloud Tools. As a bonus, Percona will raffle five (5) 60-minute MySQL query consulting sessions with Vadim to analyze your Percona Cloud Tools Query Analytics data and provide feedback and performance suggestions.  Register now to attend this free webinar!