Configuring MySQL for Best Results

Creating a MySQL User Account to Be Used with PMM

When adding a MySQL instance to monitoring, you can specify the MySQL server superuser account credentials. However, monitoring with the superuser account is not secure. If you also specify the --create-user option, it will create a user with only the necessary privileges for collecting data.

You can also set up the pmm user manually with necessary privileges and pass its credentials when adding the instance.

To enable complete MySQL instance monitoring, a command similar to the following is recommended:

sudo pmm-admin add mysql --user root --password root --create-user

The superuser credentials are required only to set up the pmm user with necessary privileges for collecting data. If you want to create this user yourself, the following privileges are required:

GRANT SELECT, PROCESS, SUPER, REPLICATION CLIENT, RELOAD ON *.* TO 'pmm'@' localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass' WITH MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 10;
GRANT SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP ON performance_schema.* TO 'pmm'@'localhost';

If the pmm user already exists, simply pass its credential when you add the instance:

sudo pmm-admin add mysql --user pmm --password pass

For more information, run as root pmm-admin add mysql --help.

Configuring the slow query log in Percona Server

If you are running Percona Server, a properly configured slow query log will provide the most amount of information with the lowest overhead. In other cases, use Performance Schema if it is supported.

By definition, the slow query log is supposed to capture only slow queries. These are the queries the execution time of which is above a certain threshold. The threshold is defined by the long_query_time variable.

In heavily loaded applications, frequent fast queries can actually have a much bigger impact on performance than rare slow queries. To ensure comprehensive analysis of your query traffic, set the long_query_time to 0 so that all queries are captured.

However, capturing all queries can consume I/O bandwidth and cause the slow query log file to quickly grow very large. To limit the amount of queries captured by the slow query log, use the query sampling feature available in Percona Server.

The log_slow_rate_limit variable defines the fraction of queries captured by the slow query log. A good rule of thumb is to have approximately 100 queries logged per second. For example, if your Percona Server instance processes 10_000 queries per second, you should set log_slow_rate_limit to 100 and capture every 100th query for the slow query log.

A possible problem with query sampling is that rare slow queries might not get captured at all. To avoid this, use the slow_query_log_always_write_time variable to specify which queries should ignore sampling. That is, queries with longer execution time will always be captured by the slow query log.

By default, slow query log settings apply only to new sessions. If you want to configure the slow query log during runtime and apply these settings to existing connections, set the slow_query_log_use_global_control variable to all.

Configuring Performance Schema

The default source of query data for PMM is the slow query log. It is available in MySQL 5.1 and later versions. Starting from MySQL 5.6 (including Percona Server 5.6 and later), you can choose to parse query data from the Performance Schema instead of slow query log. Starting from MySQL 5.6.6, Performance Schema is enabled by default.

Performance Schema is not as data-rich as the slow query log, but it has all the critical data and is generally faster to parse. If you are not running Percona Server (which supports sampling for the slow query log), then Performance Schema is a better alternative.

To use Performance Schema, set the performance_schema variable to ON:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'performance_schema';
+--------------------+-------+
| Variable_name      | Value |
+--------------------+-------+
| performance_schema | ON    |
+--------------------+-------+

If this variable is not set to ON, add the the following lines to the MySQL configuration file my.cnf and restart MySQL:

[mysql]
performance_schema=ON

If you are running a custom Performance Schema configuration, make sure that the statements_digest consumer is enabled:

mysql> select * from setup_consumers;
+----------------------------------+---------+
| NAME                             | ENABLED |
+----------------------------------+---------+
| events_stages_current            | NO      |
| events_stages_history            | NO      |
| events_stages_history_long       | NO      |
| events_statements_current        | YES     |
| events_statements_history        | YES     |
| events_statements_history_long   | NO      |
| events_transactions_current      | NO      |
| events_transactions_history      | NO      |
| events_transactions_history_long | NO      |
| events_waits_current             | NO      |
| events_waits_history             | NO      |
| events_waits_history_long        | NO      |
| global_instrumentation           | YES     |
| thread_instrumentation           | YES     |
| statements_digest                | YES     |
+----------------------------------+---------+
15 rows in set (0.00 sec)

$ mysqld --performance-schema-instrument='%=on'

If the instance is already running, configure the QAN agent to collect data from Performance Schema:

1. Open the PMM Query Analytics dashboard.
2. Click the Settings button.
3. Open the Settings section.
4. Select Performance Schema in the Collect from drop-down list.
5. Click Apply to save changes.

If you are adding a new monitoring instance with the pmm-admin tool, use the --query-source perfschema option:

Run this command as root or by using the sudo command

pmm-admin add mysql --user root --password root --create-user --query-source perfschema

For more information, run pmm-admin add mysql --help.

Configuring MySQL 8.0 for PMM

MySQL 8 (in version 8.0.4) changes the way clients are authenticated by default. The default_authentication_plugin parameter is set to caching_sha2_password. This change of the default value implies that MySQL drivers must support the SHA-256 authentication. Also, the communication channel with MySQL 8 must be encrypted when using caching_sha2_password.

The MySQL driver used with PMM does not yet support the SHA-256 authentication.

With currently supported versions of MySQL, PMM requires that a dedicated MySQL user be set up. This MySQL user should be authenticated using the mysql_native_password plugin. Although MySQL is configured to support SSL clients, connections to MySQL Server are not encrypted.

There are two workarounds to be able to add MySQL Server version 8.0.4 or higher as a monitoring service to PMM:

1. Alter the MySQL user that you plan to use with PMM
2. Change the global MySQL configuration

Altering the MySQL User

Provided you have already created the MySQL user that you plan to use with PMM, alter this user as follows:

mysql> ALTER USER pmm@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '$eCR8Tp@s$w*rD';

Then, pass this user to pmm-admin add as the value of the --user parameter.

This is a preferred approach as it only weakens the security of one user.

Changing the global MySQL Configuration

A less secure approach is to set default_authentication_plugin to the value mysql_native_password before adding it as a monitoring service. Then, restart your MySQL Server to apply this change.

[mysqld]
default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

Settings for Dashboards

Not all dashboards in Metrics Monitor are available by default for all MySQL variants and configurations: Oracle‘s MySQL, Percona Server. or MariaDB. Some graphs require Percona Server, specialized plugins, or additional configuration.

Collecting metrics and statistics for graphs increases overhead. You can keep collecting and graphing low-overhead metrics all the time, and enable high-overhead metrics only when troubleshooting problems.

mysql> SET GLOBAL innodb_monitor_enable=all

Executing Custom Queries

Starting from the version 1.15.0, PMM provides user the ability to take a SQL SELECT statement and turn the result set into metric series in PMM. The queries are executed at the LOW RESOLUTION level, which by default is every 60 seconds. A key advantage is that you can extend PMM to profile metrics unique to your environment (see users table example below), or to introduce support for a table that isn’t part of PMM yet. This feature is on by default and only requires that you edit the configuration file and use vaild YAML syntax. The default configuration file location is /usr/local/percona/pmm-client/queries-mysqld.yml.

SELECT * FROM `users`
+----+------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------------------+--------+---------+-----------+
| id | app  | user_type    | last_name | first_name | logged_in | active_subscription | banned | upvotes | downvotes |
+----+------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------------------+--------+---------+-----------+
|  1 | app2 | unprivileged | Marley    | Bob        |         1 |                   1 |      0 |     100 |        25 |
|  2 | app3 | moderator    | Young     | Neil       |         1 |                   1 |      1 |     150 |        10 |
|  3 | app4 | unprivileged | OConnor   | Sinead     |         1 |                   1 |      0 |      25 |        50 |
|  4 | app1 | unprivileged | Yorke     | Thom       |         0 |                   1 |      0 |     100 |       100 |
|  5 | app5 | admin        | Buckley   | Jeff       |         1 |                   1 |      0 |     175 |         0 |
+----+------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------------------+--------+---------+-----------+

app1_users_metrics:                                 ## leading section of your metric series.
  query: "SELECT * FROM app1.users"                 ## Your query. Don't forget the schema name.
  metrics:                                          ## Required line to start the list of metric items
    - downvotes:                                    ## Name of the column returned by the query. Will be appended to the metric series.
        usage: "COUNTER"                            ## Column value type.  COUNTER will make this a metric series.
        description: "Number of upvotes"            ## Helpful description of the column.

---
app1_users_metrics:
  query: "SELECT app,first_name,last_name,logged_in,active_subscription,banned,upvotes,downvotes FROM app1.users"
  metrics:
    - app:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "Name of the Application"
    - user_type:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "User's privilege level within the Application"
    - first_name:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "User's First Name"
    - last_name:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "User's Last Name"
    - logged_in:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "User's logged in or out status"
    - active_subscription:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "Whether User has an active subscription or not"
    - banned:
        usage: "LABEL"
        description: "Whether user is banned or not"
    - upvotes:
        usage: "COUNTER"
        description: "Count of upvotes the User has earned. Upvotes once granted cannot be revoked, so the number can only increase."
    - downvotes:
        usage: "GAUGE"
        description: "Count of downvotes the User has earned. Downvotes can be revoked so the number can increase as well as decrease."
...

pmm-admin add mysql:metrics ... -- --queries-file-name=/usr/local/percona/pmm-client/query.yml