MySQL High Availability, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Getting Started with Monitoring

Joel placed his nonfat half-caf latte, fruit cup, and cheese pastry on his desk and smiled at the parody of nutrition awaiting him. Ever since he found the upscale shopping center on his walk to work, his breakfasts had gotten rather creative.

He turned on his monitor and waited for his email application to retrieve his messages while he opened the top of his latte. Scanning the message subjects and hoping there wasn’t yet another message from his boss, he noticed several messages from users with subjects that hinted at performance issues.

Joel clicked through them, scanning the text. “Well, I guess something must be wrong,” he mumbled, as he read complaints about how applications that queried the database system were taking too long to respond.

He unwrapped his pastry and pondered what could be causing the problems. “Things were just fine yesterday,” he reasoned. After a few sips of his latte he remembered something he read about performance monitoring while working on the lab machines at college.

Joel finished his pastry and reached for his MySQL High Availability book. “There has got to be something in here,” he said.

How do you know when your servers are performing poorly? If you wait for your users to tell you something is wrong, chances are there has been something wrong for some time. Leaving problems unaddressed for an extended period complicates the diagnosis and repair process.

In this chapter, we will begin our examination of monitoring ...