Confused with PMM Advisories - 2.28.0

Hi Percona,

I have been reading about the new advisories available in v2.28.0 and I’m confused.
What is the difference between those advisories and custom metrics in VictoriaMetrics?
For example;
User password expiration - this is a custom query/collector in the agent and an alert
Variables, Binary logs, infile… - this is just a custom query in VM

I thought those advisories were going to provide additional value in the sense that they would offer some complex rules, or human pro-active review, based in Percona Support knowledge (ie. recommend TS custom values in PXC based in the last X days, or highlight a problematic query based in QAN data). That would explain the tiers and the need to go to the paid one to get the most.

Is this just a preview of what is coming? Because what we are offered today as new, has been already in our setup for years…

1 Like

You are mostly correct in that you can recreate all of the free tier advisors yourself just by polling the various datasources directly (what version of a db is running compared to current available, are there users without passwords, what is the ratio of db memory pool compared to system memory and db size, etc)…as you get into to the higher tiers though, the checks get much more complex and start aggregating multiple sources of information to arrive at the advice (DB data, all the available exporters data, query analytics data, etc) and include our years of experience in the recommendations. We’re working on the designs now so that you can write your own advisors and your imagination is the limit.

There is still a LOT more to come in terms of where advisors will go as we incorporate forecasting models into them and natively integrated advisors with alerts (at the current rate you will run out of disk in 2 years…but we’ll alert you automatically if it’s going to happen in say 2 weeks…) as well as risk mitigation (say your running 5 versions back of mysql and that means you’re a CVVS risk score of 9…well going to latest may take you down to a 4 but perhaps going only 2 versions would get you to a 2…latest isn’t always best!).

Remember with Percona, the software is free and we try to build stuff such that if you’ve got the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities you’ll never need to pay us a thing, but if you don’t (or do but don’t have the time) then you become a customer and the advisors in the paid tier DO have a lot of the Percona best practices that our engineers and consultants would give in an audit or health check but now they run continuously.

2 Likes