Monitoring MySQL Servers

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system, and is one of the most popular databases in the market today. Owing to a rise in its popularity in the past decade, the need to ensure the continuous availability and optimal performance of the MySQL database server has also attained significance.

eG Enterprise provides an exclusive MySQL monitoring model that runs quick health checks on the MySQL database server at configured intervals, and proactively alerts administrators to potential bottlenecks to the performance of the server.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the MySQL server

Using the model depicted by Figure 1, administrators can determine the following:

• Is the database server available? If so, how quickly does it respond to user requests?
• Is the server overloaded?
• Are clients able to connect to the server, or are there too many connection failures?
• Are connections been closed properly? Are there an unusual number of open connections to the server?
• Is the query cache been utilized optimally?
• Has adequate memory been allotted to the cache?
• Is the key buffer cache utilized well?
• Is query execution efficient, or do queries need to be optimized for better performance?
• Are rollbacks kept at a minimum?
• Should the sort_buffer be increased?
• How is the overall locking activity on the server? Are too many requests waiting to acquire locks?

This section will deal with the first four layers of the layer model only, as the rest of the layers have been discussed elaborately in the Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document.