Chapter 14. Tools for Managing and Monitoring MySQL
The last few years have been tremendously exciting when it comes to third-party tools for MySQL. We have gone from a few little tools here and there to professionally maintained packages of tools, with many of the utilities in these packages solving issues that have been problematic for MySQL DBAs for a very long time. We will be covering a few of our favorite packages in this chapter. We will not be covering any commercial (for-pay) utilities. There are many great ones, of course, but we will limit this chapter to either open source or “free as in beer” utilities.
Percona Toolkit
The Percona Toolkit actually used to be called Maatkit, before its adventures in rebranding. It was a must-have toolkit before the rename and has only gotten more so since. It contains over 30 tools, varying from hugely complicated and impactful utilities to glorified output reformatters. Some of the most important tools include:
- pt-query-digest
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There once was a tool called mysqlsla, which basically everyone used to read the MySQL slow query log and output reports showing the top slow queries in the log. This was very useful, but mysqlsla didn’t really progress much. pt-query-digest is a replacement that allows for running
EXPLAINs automatically, monitoring process lists, and even generating ASCII graphs. Is it an overengineered tool for its purpose? Probably. Is it awesome enough that we don’t care about that? Absolutely. - pt-table-checksum
- We recommend ...